Canada Demands Backup In Afghanistan or They Leave.

Will the Nato coalition last in Afghanistan?

Canada's demand gets attention

NATO defence ministers set to discuss Kandahar mission ultimatum
Jan 30, 2008
ALLAN WOODS
OTTAWA BUREAU The Star

OTTAWA–Canada's Afghanistan ultimatum will be at the top of the agenda when NATO defence ministers meet in Lithuania in one week's time, a spokesperson for the military alliance said yesterday.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said this week that Canada's 2,500 soldiers in Kandahar must be backed up by an additional 1,000 troops from another country or he will pull out of the Afghan mission in February 2009.

NATO spokesperson James Appathurai said he is optimistic NATO can find more soldiers, but indicated that Harper's threat has caused some alarm at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

"Clearly there is an issue in Kandahar and this will certainly be discussed in Vilnius," he said, referring to the Lithuanian capital where defence ministers will gather on Feb. 7 and 8.

The comments came as Washington endorsed Harper's criticism that NATO's efforts have not been adequate in Afghanistan, particularly in Kandahar province.

The Pentagon has long complained European militaries are not sending enough soldiers or sharing enough of the risk in Afghanistan, and a spokesperson said yesterday that NATO could not count on the U.S. to carry a heavier load.

The U.S. is deploying 3,200 marines to Afghanistan in March, 2,200 of whom will be sent to Kandahar and other dangerous southern provinces.

But that rotation will only last seven months, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell said in Washington. "That's as much and as deep as we're going at this point," he said. "We've done, as I made clear, what we can do."

Harper has vowed to lead a diplomatic effort to convince Canada's NATO partners to make greater contributions to the multinational force, and his efforts are focused on a major meeting of the alliance in Bucharest in April.

But Canada will also get help from Washington, Morrell said.

"You will hear from us, as we get closer to Vilnius and Bucharest, a desire to have our allies who are providing combat forces to the efforts in Afghanistan ... see what more they can do," he said. "So, hopefully, we'll make some progress there that will help the Canadians extend their commitment to the mission."

Last week's report by former Liberal minister John Manley on the future of the Afghan mission painted a gloomy picture of disjointed United Nations and NATO efforts and of poor co-ordination of aid and development dollars. But it also said the Canadian mission was bound to fail, and should be ended, if Canada did not get military help, plus transport helicopters and unmanned aerial surveillance craft.

"We obviously have taken good note of what Harper has said and we have read the Manley report very carefully. We share the view that Afghanistan needs long-term support, and that includes military support," Appathurai said.

He said 10 countries have already promised to boost the number of soldiers they have on the ground in Afghanistan, including Poland.

"I don't think there is any reason to call into question NATO's credibility. The mission continues to increase in size and continues to achieve success," he said.

Anybody But McCain

Thoughts on the Republican candidates.

I am sorry that early on, I dismissed Congressman Paul as a nut, but honestly, you can't listen to the man and not see that he is very intelligent with very sound positions and has the best interests of the country at heart. I have grown to respect him and I'm glad that he is in the race.

Governor Huckabee, too, is a surprise. He is an extremely capable politician and carries his own in any debate. He has a great sense of humor and seems to have a good grasp of the issues.

I like the business skills and experience that George Romney brings to the table. I believe that these abilities and insights will serve the country well in the coming years.

Senator McCain has served his country. He deserves the accolades and thanks due any veteran who made the sacrifices he made for his country. He was right about more troops for Iraq. He says he learned his lesson about immigration. He will see that a fence is built before any more reforms are proposed. But I'm sorry, I remember the two weeks last year when he and Lindsey Graham along with George Bush and Teddy Kennedy tried their damnest to push the Comprehensive Immigration Reform down the throats of America. I'm sorry Senator, those wounds are too fresh in my mind and coupled with issues such as McCain-Feingold, the gang of fourteen, your stance on "torture", and your big government attitude, I just can't support you. I would vote for any Republican candidate before I voted for you.

NATO Schmato

This is hard to believe:

Afghanistan may plunge into 'failed state,' experts warn

by P. Parameswaran2 hours, 2 minutes ago

Insurgency-wracked Afghanistan will become a failed state if urgent steps are not taken to tackle a deteriorating security situation and lackluster reconstruction and governance efforts, experts warned in separate reports Wednesday.

"Urgent changes are required now to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a failing or failed state," said one report from the Atlantic Council of the United States, led by retired Marine Corps general James Jones.

It said Taliban militant control of the sparsely populated parts of Afghanistan was "increasing" and civil reforms, reconstruction, and development work "have not gained traction" across the country, especially in the south.

"To add insult to injury, of every dollar of aid spent on Afghanistan, less than ten percent goes directly to Afghans, further compounding reform and reconstruction problems," the report said.

Southern Afghanistan has seen the worst violence since the Taliban were ousted from power in the US-led invasion in 2001 following the September 11 terror attacks masterminded by Al-Qaeda, whose leaders were given sanctuary by the Taliban.

As US and NATO-led troops wage an uphill battle now to keep the Taliban at bay, civil sector reform "is in serious trouble" despite immense resources poured into the country and nearly seven years of efforts, the report said.

"If Afghanistan fails, the possible strategic consequences will worsen regional instability, do great harm to the fight against Jihadist and religious extremism," the report said.

It would also "put in grave jeopardy NATO's future as a credible, cohesive and relevant military alliance," it said, asking NATO nations unable to contribute more troops to redouble civilian reconstruction aid.

Europe needs to "wake up" to this crisis, said David Abshire, head of the Center for the Study of the Presidency, which examines the performances of the US presidents and relate its findings to present challenges.

The center's Afghanistan Study Group, co-chaired by Jones and former UN ambassador Thomas Pickering, said the "light footprint" in Afghanistan needed to be replaced with the "right footprint" by the United States and its allies.

The group called for the appointment of a US special envoy for Afghanistan, charged with coordinating all aspects of US policies toward it.

It also wanted the US administration and the Congress to "decouple" Iraq and Afghanistan in the legislative process and in the management of these conflicts in the executive branch.

US Senator John Kerry warned that Afghanistan could snowball into Vietnam-like turmoil.

"Absent a new focus and a transformed strategy, I fear that may be happening again in Afghanistan," said the ex-Vietnam War hero as he launched the expert reports at Capitol Hill.

Recent polls in Afghanistan reflect skepticism over the ability of Kabul and the international community to tackle critical problems such as insecurity, weak governance, widespread corruption, a poor economy and unemployment.

Reacting to the reports, the US State Department said there had been "real progress" since the Taliban ouster and underlined the need for NATO and others to maintain strong commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan and improving security.

"We know what a failed state in Afghanistan looks like. That was Afghanistan under the Taliban prior to 2001. Afghanistan today does not look like that," said department spokesman Sean McCormack.

"There has been real progress where Afghanistan was six years ago. Is there a long way to go? Absolutely," he said.

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I'll be shocked if the Euros do anything significant. Despite cajoling and shaming, the Europeans have shown no interest in doing anything more than they done all along. Why don't we just let NATO go by the wayside? Oh, after Iran is dealt with.

The Choice: McCain, Hillary or Obama?

Think about it.

It is a little late to be complaining that McCain is not Republican enough. For seven years the Republicans have not been Republican enough. The Republican oligarchs had an ample opportunity to discipline themselves in Congress. They did not. They failed miserably in some very important areas and none other than in way out of control government spending.

For seven years we had a Republican President that could not find his veto pen. It was a Republican Administration that failed to enforce US immigration laws, and it was a Republican Administration with no leadership skills that failed to maintain a Republican majority in Congress. None of that was McCain's doing. A US Senator is a party of one.

The choice is becoming very narrow and parochial. Who will serve your interests better, McCain, Hillary or Obama? The Iranians must be asking themselves the same question. I doubt any Republican can win, but I have no doubt as to what happens if the Democrats do. I have as much enthusiasm for McCain as I did for Ford and Bob Dole, but Romney just does not seem to have the horsepower that is still left in JMAC. A Supreme Court dominated by those chosen by Hillary or Obama will be a disaster for conservatives.

There are some others who will be even less happy to see a John McCain candidacy. Maybe the Iranians would even have a Reagan-Carter moment, when they released US hostages on Reagan's inauguration day. Look at the sunny side, eh Rat?

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Talk radio impugns McCain's liberal record
By Donald Lambro Washington Times
January 30, 2008

Conservative talk radio is ganging up on presidential candidate John McCain, attacking him for joining Democrats to push liberal legislation and opposing bedrock Republican positions from tax cuts to immigration.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appears to be the favorite of conservative talk-radio stars and stands to benefit from their distaste for the Arizona senator, who is running neck and neck with Mr. Romney in the race for the presidential nomination.

While most polls show the two men in a dead heat in key primary and caucus contests across the nation, the campaign battle on talk radio has turned into a lopsided offensive against Mr. McCain, whose positions on illegal aliens, President Bush's tax cuts, oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and campaign-finance regulation have infuriated conservative commentators.

"I don't think talk radio has changed their core views. Look at Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Mark Levin and myself, all center-right conservatives generally supportive of the Republicans," talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt told The Washington Times.

"I think if you were to poll that universe of talkers, you would find they would be anti-McCain-Feingold [on campaign finance]; anti-McCain-Kennedy [on immigration], except for Medved; pro-oil exploration in ANWR; and supporters of the Bush tax cuts," Mr. Hewitt said as he ticked off bills the Arizona senator has championed or opposed in the Senate.

"So the hostility toward the McCain legislative record shouldn't surprise anyone," the founder of the conservative Townhall Web site said.

Mr. Hewitt also told the Associated Press yesterday that "Senator McCain is a great American, a lousy senator and a terrible Republican. He has a legislative record that is not conservative. In fact, it is anti-conservative." He said he would support Mr. Romney "if I was voting today."

For weeks, Mr. Limbaugh, the king of talk radio, also has pounded Mr. McCain as a Republican who deserted his party's positions on core issues — from his earlier opposition to the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 to his support with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, for an immigration bill that would have given illegal aliens a path to citizenship.

This week, Mr. Limbaugh went after the senator for his alliance with environmentalists and his opposition to President Bush's push to open ANWR's vast oil reserves to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

"McCain has been an active promoter of the global-warming hysteria — for which he has been lauded by radical environmentalists — and he is a co-sponsor of a leftist scheme for energy rationing," the famed talkmeister told his more than 20 million listeners last week.

"If anybody has any doubts whatsoever, my differences with Senator McCain are substantive," he said. "When you boil this down, this really is between McCain and Romney right now."

Not all of the leading conservative talk-radio hosts oppose Mr. McCain, though even some of his supporters admit his anti-conservative positions often have pushed them to the edge of endurance.

"I've been getting a lot heat from listeners for defending McCain, even though I acknowledge the many disagreements I've had with him. I've been getting a constant barrage from my audience. It's getting really heated," Bill Bennett said yesterday.

"I admire the heck out of John McCain and disagree with him on at least half a dozen serious matters," Mr. Bennett said. "He is a war hero, he has been consistently pro-life, he put his campaign in hostage to the success of the surge in Iraq, he's been a consistent hawk on pork-barrel spending, and can win in November."

But the former drug czar and education secretary said the intensity of the anti-McCain calls to his radio program show he does not have the support of his party's conservative base.

"What rankles me the most is his tendency to criticize our side first. Why bash us, why not bash Hillary Clinton? He's got to have some of the fire that Democrats have for Republicans, but we don't see it," he said. "If he is the nominee, he's got to fix things with the base of the party, because you can't have a convention with these kinds of feelings."

Does he have a breaking point over the senator's candidacy? "Ask me tomorrow," he replied.

European Press Reviews of US Presidential Election

A fair amount of the articles we use for comment come from European news sources. I thought it would be interesting to see how they view the process. This from: The American Thinker

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European Press and the Presidential Election
By Soeren Kern

The outcome of the US presidential election affects the lives of millions of people around the world. So it's probably not surprising that many Europeans are resentful that only Americans will have a say in it. European media are saturated with election coverage that is heavily biased in favor of the Democrats. And, as in past elections, European elites are also demanding the right to help choose the next occupant of the White House. What follows is a brief survey of what some Europeans are saying about the American way of democracy.

An editorial in the Brussels-based, center-right De Standaard articulates a view shared by many Europeans:

"American presidential elections are not ‘home affairs'. American decisions have repercussions all over the globe.... Hence, the world should be given the right to vote."

This view is echoed by the London-based, conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph. A column titled ‘If Only We Could Vote for the Next US President' argues:

"Many Britons will feel it would be rather nice to have a vote, too. Well, maybe not a whole vote: I would settle for one worth 50 per cent of those cast by American citizens. After all, since we are a strategic colony of the US, it would be nice to have even a marginal say in how the empire chooses to dispose our goodwill and our blood and treasure."

What European elites really seem to want is the right to "help" Americans choose the "correct" candidate. And if newspaper headlines are any indication, that person is, overwhelmingly, Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Indeed, across the continent, European elites are infatuated with Obama, who is now a cult figure.

In Germany, the center-right Berliner Morgenpost proclaims that Obama is ‘The New Kennedy' while the centrist tabloid Bild says that ‘This Black American Has Become the New Kennedy!'

The left-wing Frankfurter Rundschau compares Obama not only to Kennedy, but also to Presidents Lincoln and Roosevelt

"Obama is the candidate of the idealists.... Obama also happens to be the candidate of choice for the foreign press.... Many in Europe would like nothing more than a ‘European' America."

In the Netherlands, the left-leaning De Volkskrant reports that the US primaries are giving the Dutch "goose bumps.... Obama has the authenticity that the Dutch electorate craves."

In France, the center-left Libération says the new leader of the French Socialist Party should be someone with Obama's profile:

"The French Left seeks a charismatic leader, age 46, of mixed race, to deliver a message of hope and unity. At a time when American Democrats are discovering their new hero, it would be a good time for the Socialist Party and their friends to find a Barack Obama to end their internal quarrels."

Meanwhile, in an online poll at the center-left Le Nouvel Observateur, Obama has an overwhelming 60 percent of the 2,680 votes cast, double Clinton's 30 percent. The late President Kennedy is lagging behind, with only 4 percent of the votes.

In Britain, the centrist Times of London confirms that the Tories are suffering an identity crisis by reporting that

"Tories and Labour both hope for a sprinkling of Barack Obama's stardust. Ripples of excitement from the campaign of the presidential contender have crossed the Atlantic, and British politicians are agog."

After months of glorifying Obama, European media have tried to portray his losses to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and Nevada as part of an elaborate conspiracy to keep a black man from becoming the 44th president of the United States. After Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, for example, the Milan-based, center-right Il Giornale reported that Obama was the victim of vote-rigging.

In Germany, the Financial Times Deutschland opines:

"there is something narcissistic at the heart of the idea that Clinton was breaking down at the thought that America might be recklessly throwing away the chance to be governed by her. Chronic egocentrism, narcissism, self-pity-these are exactly the qualities that to this day make Bill Clinton so hated by his enemies."

The state-sponsored Deutsche Welle argues that although Clinton's victory in New Hampshire is being put down to her display of ‘genuine' emotion, it is actually a further example of "US politics descending into self-parody."

France, meanwhile, dispatched its ambassador to keep an eye on campaign events in New Hampshire.

"There's a lot of interest in France in this election.... The administration in Paris wants regular reports," says France's ambassador to the United States.

In an essay titled ‘The End of the Obama Revolution', Der Spiegel laments:

"All of those people who've been dreaming of America's first black president now have to slowly wake up. It'll happen one day, hopefully, but not in this election."

The Times of London says:

"For all his talk of changing America's face to the world and rebuilding old alliances, Mr Obama has been notably reluctant to engage, particularly with Europe. As British and European leaders ponder the meaning and consequences of Mr Obama's sudden rise, perhaps they should be asking instead how much they really matter to him."

Good point.

Indeed, another Times of London story frets that:

"Obama has made only one brief official visit to London-and none elsewhere in Western Europe...."

In an 800-word rant titled ‘American Primary System Fails to Impress Europeans', Deutsche Welle implies that if Germans cannot help Americans vote Obama into office, then the US political system itself must be flawed. DW asserts that American democracy is "atavistic. It's outdated. It doesn't really reflect democracy in a modern sense." The story goes on to say that America would be better off if it adopted a parliamentary system, just like the one in (surprise!) Germany.

Some Europeans are beginning to wake up to the reality that a Democrat in the White House might not be in their best interests.

The Hamburg-based, conservative-leaning Die Welt offers the most forthright analysis of the implications for Europe of a Clinton victory.

"For Germany, it greatly matters who finally wins the presidential race. The Clintons are not naive admirers of Germany and/or Europe. As heirs to an unpopular war in Iraq, the Clintons, after returning to the White House, would demand military coalition troop support from Europe. Indeed, as early as 2004, Gerhard Schroeder was warned that the worst possible outcome of his anti-Iraq war stance would have been a John Kerry victory. Because then the German chancellor would have had a friendly, but pushy partner in the White House who would have quickly put an end to Berlin's anti-American politicking by asking for assistance in Baghdad."

According to the London-based Economist,

"Nor is European enthusiasm for either candidate likely to survive the election of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama, or whoever else becomes president. The person who gets voters' nod will rule as an American, promoting American interests around the world-and no doubt disappointing many watchers from abroad. For Europeans to imagine anything else would be naive indeed."

In Spain, El Diario Exterior argues that an Obama victory could be especially counter-productive for the European Left, because it will show that America is not the racist state that European elites say it is:

"The [European] Left, which likes to attribute to the United States an imperialist foreign policy and discrimination against blacks and Hispanics, is not as happy about the rise of Obama as one would expect. On sending the message that they are ready to elect an African American, a part of American society is exhibiting an attitude much less prejudiced than is commonly attributed to this country."

The article goes on to remind readers that Europe's multicultural Socialist utopia has failed to beget its own Obama.

After seeing American democracy in high gear, European publics are fretting about the relative lack of democracy at home. As the Paris-based International Herald Tribune points out in a column titled ‘Don't Look for Democracy in the EU Presidency',

"unlike America's presidential primary elections, the start of Europe's presidential selection process foretells very little to do with revivifying democracy."

It continues:

"The choice of the European president is true to the EU's historical character. Rather than a popular vote, the selection process will belong to the council of chiefs of state and government...."

Finally, London's leftwing Guardian concedes that America is doing something right for a change. In a rare case of introspection and self-criticism, the paper admonishes Britons that

"reflecting on the wide-open campaign of 2008, it's obvious that British critics-and European critics generally-are guilty of smug superiority and ignorance in writing off the strengths of the American system.... Instead of dismissing American democracy in our snooty way, we need to ask what we can learn."

Now that's a thought!

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group

Tomorrow's a Big Day

Can McCain Control His Temper?

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, January 28, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: John McCain claims his temper is not an issue. "I don't think I would have the support of so many of my colleagues if that were the case." Who are these supportive colleagues?

Related Topics: Election 2008

They certainly do not include Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss. Over the weekend, he announced he cannot endorse his colleague for the White House and is endorsing Gov. Mitt Romney instead.

"The thought of him being president sends a cold chill down my spine," Cochran said. "He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

Perhaps Cochran can't appreciate the maverick in McCain. But the same can't be said of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a noted reformer and friend of whistle-blowers. Grassley said in a recent interview that he was so upset by a McCain tirade that he didn't speak to him "for a couple of years." McCain got in his face and shouted an obscenity at him.

(Grassley says they're on friendly terms now and thinks McCain has the qualifications to be president. But he stressed he's not making an endorsement.)

McCain admits he's rubbed some senators the wrong way. But he explains that what they really don't like is his tough stand against farm subsidies and "pork barrel" spending.

If that were the case, we'd say more power to him. But it seems McCain goes ballistic on anyone who disagrees with him. And he's not just verbally abusive, but physically threatening.

He got in the grille of Sen. Richard Shelby — an inch away from the Alabama Republican's face — after Shelby voted against the 1989 nomination of John Tower as defense secretary. "I was madder than hell when I accosted him," McCain admits, half boasting.

"In his world, it's very difficult to have a simple policy disagreement," said American Conservative Union chairman David Keene. "Everything becomes personal. His position is right, and everyone else's is basically evil."

Lest anyone think McCain, now 71, has mellowed, he got in another altercation just last year. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, got full frontal McCain over an immigration bill, according to reports in Roll Call and the Washington Post.

McCain, who supported amnesty for illegals, accused his colleague of making a "chickensh**" argument to try to sink the bill. "F*** you!" McCain shouted at Cornyn during the negotiations. "I know more about this than anyone else in the room."

"Idiot" and "liar" are among his other favorite put-downs. McCain's "finger-in-your-eye" style has alienated even allies on the Hill.

He quips he "didn't win Miss Congeniality." But outside of wielding the gavel of the Senate Commerce Committee, he didn't win any top leadership posts, either, despite 25 years in Congress. In effect, the abrasive lawmaker was marginalized throughout his career.

While good leaders don't always win popularity contests, that's not exactly a vote of confidence for somebody who's now running to lead the free world.

McCain has burned a lot of bridges. If he does not work well with others in the Senate, including among those in his own party, how can he count on bringing them on board his executive agenda? How can he run a Cabinet and bring together international coalitions?

To be sure, there's an upside to anger when dealing with the kind of enemy we now face.

We appreciate that McCain, who was dead right about the surge, is willing to stare down "radical Islamic extremists." We want them to fear our commander in chief. It helps if they believe he's got his finger on the button, so to speak, as the Soviets believed with President Reagan.

Difference is, Reagan didn't have an itchy trigger finger. His recently published diaries confirm that he skillfully used firm diplomacy behind the scenes. We're not so sure McCain can control his bellicosity.

Reagan disarmed Mikhail Gorbachev with his charm. When McCain says he looks Vladimir Putin in the eye and all he sees is "a K, a G and a B," it may not be just a line he uses in debates.

We have our issues with McCain, but none more important than presidential temperament. Is he fit for the highest office in the land?

Kite-powered Cargo Ships

Incrementally, each small invention on energy conservation will probably accomplish more than hoping and waiting for one super break-through on replacing petroleum. The plug in electric car like the proposed Chevy Volt, where one drives the first forty miles before the gasoline engine kicks in, seems sensible and practical for most people in urbanized areas. Why not sail assisted cargo ships? 

Kite-Pulled Ship Saves Big By Going Retro
DW
The sail flies at a height of about 300 meters (980 feet)

The world's first kite-powered cargo ship set sail on Tuesday, Jan. 22, from Germany to Venezuela. Its makers hope to prove that using earth-friendly energy can also mean saving a fortune.

Sailboats are anything but modern -- unless we're talking about the MS Beluga Skysails, which is now chugging across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of a 160-square-meter (1,722-square-foot) computer-controlled kite.

The contraption's inventor, 35-year-old Stephen Wrage, said supplementing the ship's diesel engine with wind power should cut its daily fuel bill by 20 percent -- at a time when oil has exceeded $90 (62 euros) a barrel.

Turning to alternative energy sources like wind power, an ancient tool in ocean travel, also reduces the ship's CO2 output.

"During the next few months, we will finally be able to prove that our technology works in practice and significantly reduces fuel consumption and emissions," said Wrage, founder and president of the Hamburg-based company SkySails.

The kite, shaped like a paraglider, flies up to 300 meters (980 feet) high to be able to pull the 10,000-ton vessel. It cost about 500,000 euros to make, not counting the five years of research Wrage and his colleagues put into it.

Yield for cash

The world's 55,000 cargo ships transport 90 percent of its goods
Though freight ships are the world's most important commercial transport method, carrying 90 percent of all traded goods, they were excluded from the UN's climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol. Experts have advocated that the industry -- which produced 5 percent of the world's total carbon emissions -- be included in the successor treaty, to take effect after Kyoto expires in 2012.

But as long as oil prices remain high, ship companies already have a hefty incentive to reduce their fuel consumption. Many have already made effective efforts to save fuel by mandating slower speeds in their fleets.

Hamburg-based logistics company Hapag-Lloyd, for example, reduced the standard speed of its ships from 23.5 to 20 knots in the second half of last year and reported "significant savings."

"Before, ships would speed up to 25 knots from the standard 23.5 to make up if time was lost in crowded ports," said company spokesman Klaus Heims. "We calculated that five knots slower saves up to 50 percent in fuel and it had the added effect of cutting carbon dioxide emissions immediately."

More sail, more savings

The sails will have to get a lot bigger before they can be used commercially
There are lots more ways for ships to push down their fuel consumption and drive up their savings, Hermann Klein from Germanischer Lloyd classification society told Reuters news agency.

Using weather forecasts to select optimal routes, cleaning the ships regularly to remove sediments that would cause resistance and using fuel additives for better performance would benefit the company's budget and the earth, Klein said, adding that opting for slower-speed engines with greater fuel efficiency makes more sense than running high-power engines at a slower pace.

Wrage and his SkySails company, however, expect many shipping firms to choose kite power, should the maiden voyage turn out to be a success.

Larger kites could cut fuel usage by 30 to 50 percent, Wrage said. The company hopes to double the size of the kites to 320 square meters and then expand them again to 600 square meters by 2009. They intend to fit 1,500 ships with the sails by 2015.

The Clintons Shrinks in Stature. Kennedy Chooses Obama.

It was inevitable that Obama would have to diminish the Clinton legacy in order for him to find his break-out point but I did not expect Bill Clinton to hand it to him. Hand it to him he did. Obama seized the moment and converted Bill and Hillary to remnants of the past. Now, no one has questioned that the past may start looking good compared to the future present. A lot can happen between now and then. The Clinton machine will grind on and should not be taken for granted, but last night I heard the shrill of a bad bearing or two. I confess that the more I see Obama, the more I understand the phenomenon.

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Caroline Kennedy sees Obama carrying on JFK legacy
January 27, 2008
BY MONIFA THOMAS Staff Reporter/mjthomas@suntimes.com

Former first daughter Caroline Kennedy has thrown her support behind Sen. Barack Obama, calling him the presidential candidate most capable of carrying on the legacy of her late father, John F. Kennedy.

Caroline Kennedy's endorsement is a key one for Obama, whose camp has sought to portray him as a worthy heir to the former president's "Camelot" image.

Yet it remains to be seen whether Kennedy's uncle and Democratic party heavyweight Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) will also come out in favor of Obama ahead of the Feb. 5 primaries.

In a column today in the New York Times, titled ''A president like my father,'' Caroline Kennedy said she is backing Obama because he offers the same uplifting message of hope and change that her father did when he ran for president in 1960.

"I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president -- not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans," Kennedy wrote in the editorial.

She also credited Obama with making "the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning."

Obama, who scored a big win Saturday in South Carolina, issued a statement calling it "a special privilege to have [Kennedy's] endorsement because I've always believed that Caroline's father was one of our greatest presidents."

It isn't the first time the daughter of an iconic politician has helped boost Obama in an important race.

In an interesting parallel, Sheila Simon, daughter of the late Sen. Paul Simon, vouched for Obama on her father's behalf in a powerful TV ad that some strategists say helped Obama win his U.S. Senate seat.

Son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi Did What?

"Say it ain't so."

No, not even the Middle east can be that FUBAR can it? If this is true then please check your hope chest at the door because there isn't any. I am taking a walk along the beach and will be back for coffee after sun rise. The howler monkeys are restless and curiosity beckons. Don't let it get any more nuts while I'm gone.
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Gadhafi son tied to Iraq bombing
By Robert H. Reid Washington Times
January 27, 2008

BAGHDAD (AP) — A son of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is behind a group of foreign and Iraqi fighters responsible for this week's devastating explosion in northern Iraq, a security chief for Sunni tribesmen who rose up against al Qaeda said yesterday.

At least 38 persons were killed and 225 wounded Wednesday when a huge blast destroyed about 50 buildings in a Mosul slum. The next day, a suicide bomber killed the provincial police chief and two other officers as they surveyed the blast site.

Col. Jubair Rashid Naief, who also is a police official in Anbar province, said those attacks were carried out by the Seifaddin Regiment, composed of about 150 foreign and Iraqi fighters who slipped into the country several months ago from Syria.

Col. Naief said the organization, which is working with al Qaeda in Iraq, was supported by Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, 36, the eldest son of the Libyan leader.

"I am sure of what I am talking about, and it is documented," Col. Naief said, adding that he is "100 percent sure" of the younger Mr. Gadhafi's role with the terror group.

A man who answered the phone at Col. Gadhafi's office in Tripoli, Libya, said he was not immediately available for comment on the accusation.

Col. Naief said his information about the Seifaddin Regiment and the younger Mr. Gadhafi's purported role came from "reliable sources" maintained by his Anbar Awakening Council within the ranks of al Qaeda in Mosul and elsewhere.

He said the information was passed to the U.S. military two or three months ago.

"They crossed the Syrian border nearest to Mosul within the last two to three months," Col. Naief said of the Seifaddin Regiment. "Since then, they have taken up positions in the city and begun blowing up cars and launching other terror operations."

The Anbar Awakening Council is an alliance of Sunni tribes in the western province that turned against al Qaeda and began working with U.S. forces. The council is credited with the sharp drop in violence in Anbar, once the main base for the insurgents.

Many of the council's fighters are thought to have been insurgents themselves until they began receiving money from the Americans to turn their guns on their former extremist allies.

The U.S. military did not immediately respond to an e-mail request for comment about Col. Naief's claim.

The Washington Post last week quoted U.S. military officials as saying that 19 percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq come from Libya. Overall, North Africans account for 40 percent of the foreign-fighter ranks, the newspaper said.

Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, however, seems an unlikely figure as a sponsor of terrorism. Touted as a reformer, Mr. Gadhafi has reached out to the West to soften Libya's image and return it to the international mainstream.

Known in Libya as "the Engineer," he won praise last year for helping release five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were jailed in Libya for purportedly infecting Libyan children with HIV.

Educated at a British university and fluent in English, German and French, he also has gained exposure as head of the Gadhafi International Association for Charitable Organizations, a nongovernmental network concerned with issues like human rights and education.

Mr. Gadhafi was quoted by the Austrian Press Agency last year as warning Europeans against more attacks by radical Islamists.

"The only solution to contain radicalism is the rapid departure of Western troops from Iraq as well as Afghanistan, and a solution to the Palestinian question," he was quoted as saying.

Obama Wins South Carolina With 80% of Black Vote

Brotherhood

Fox declares Obama the winner in South Carolina. It looks as if it all comes down to race. Tribalism is after all the natural state of things. If white liberals would understand that, than at least we could have an honest understanding of reality. The key will be black woman voters. If they break solidly for Obama, then Obama is the black candidate, for better or worse. this is probably good news for Republicans. They never get black voters anyway and politically owe the blacks nothing. The more Obama becomes the black candidate, the more he loses that special thing he started with in Iowa.

Jim Cramer on the Stimulus Package

The Stimulator

The plan put together by The President and Congress is no more well thought out and will probably be as effective as most other big Washington ideas. Jim Cramer has a better idea.
This actually makes some sense but is missing an important component. How do you stimulate housing and not face the same problem again? It seems to me that there has been way too much investment in housing and too much use of housing to encourage spending over savings. Add a component that addresses that issue and Cramer may be on to something.

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The Phony Stimulus
The Bush economic plan is a $150 billion debacle. Here's a cheaper, more effective, and longer-lasting alternative.

By James J. Cramer NYmag Published Jan 24, 2008

Everybody likes "free" money. So it's no wonder that President Bush's plan to give up to $1,200 per family to taxpayers to get the economy moving again will sail through Congress. The logic seems compelling: We face a looming recession because the consumer isn't spending. Give 'em some money to spend! The president's team is hailing the plan as a cheap $150 billion shot in the arm that will check the downturn and get the economy rolling again.

Do you mind if I'm blunt and say that this is the stupidest, most wasteful, and least effective idea possible to reverse the decline in the U.S. economy, a decline that is pulling the rest of the world down with it? The only stimulus this package will generate is a boost to the bottom lines of Men's Wearhouse or Nike or maybe Apple, as if what really ails America is slowing suit, sneaker, and iPod sales. The stimulus plan shows, once again, the cluelessness of this administration about how the economy works, something I find especially depressing given that Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary who was no lightweight when he ran Goldman Sachs, should know better. He must know the plan will do nothing, other than get some politicians reelected, because it doesn't address the core issue: the decline of home prices in America and the broader financial impact of that decline. Until homes sell for $1,200, this plan's not worth the paper the rebate checks will be printed on.

The fact is, we can attack the root of the crisis, mortgage-related problems, for far less money and resurrect the economy much faster with a couple of simple ideas. First, let's take a hard look at the real cause of the problem: We have too many defaulting mortgages and home-equity loans from people who bought homes-some on speculation, some because they actually wanted to live in them-and could not afford the purchase price. Encouraged by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and current chairman Ben Bernanke, home buyers used exotic mortgages that required them to put little money down to purchase homes that were quickly appreciating in value. Millions of home buyers then took home-equity loans on top of their mortgages to capitalize on that appreciation. Now that home values are declining nationwide and mortgage rates are being reset higher, the buyers can't afford to pay either their first mortgage or the home-equity loan and are facing defaults and foreclosures that threaten to leave them destitute.

It's tempting to suggest an Agricultural Adjustment Act type of program under which we actually obliterate excess homes that can't be sold. That would certainly restore home-price appreciation, but Toll Brothers houses cost a whole lot more than pigs or corn, and even the winners in that game might find that solution excessive.

But there's another strategy that's by far the cheapest and most immediate way to deal with the problem: The Federal Reserve needs to cut the federal-funds rate, the short-term rate that it lowered last week to 3.5 percent, in half, to 1.75 percent, and it needs to do it now. That would be a huge shock treatment that would send mortgage rates plunging and allow home buyers from the 2005-2007 vintage, where the real problems are, to escape the death spiral of adjustable mortgage resets (those rates are pegged to the federal-funds rate). For those who have put down little or no equity and are hanging on, the Federal Housing Administration also needs to guarantee a refinanced mortgage at a much lower rate, which it will be able to do without much risk if the federal-funds rate is cut that low. The FHA is already set up to make just this kind of guarantee (and funded to absorb potential losses). Meanwhile, a huge number of people with good incomes and equity in their homes will be able to refinance their existing mortgages, which would put far more spending money in people's pockets than a onetime $1,200 check. In fact, in many cases it could produce that kind of savings every month.

With short rates this low, people would also come off the sidelines to take advantage of the glut and buy homes. Some would say that the short-term teasers that would be available could cause the same problems we had in the last go-round. But the unscrupulous lenders who made those loans are almost all wiped out, so that's not an issue, and only creditworthy borrowers would be able to take advantage of the new loans, so there is no moral hazard there. Bankers have at last learned to give loans that actually have a chance of being paid back to their own banks instead of shipped off to Wall Street as part of a residential-mortgage bond that no one trusts or wants anymore.

Finally, to ensure that mortgage money is available, banks have to be able to quantify their current losses on their –residential-–mortgage bonds. Right now, most of the toxic instruments the banks hold that might go belly-up are insured by two large financial insurers, Ambac and MBIA. The losses on these pieces of paper are so much greater than those companies can absorb that the banks can't count on getting paid from them in the event of a default. The uncertainty is paralyzing the major banks. What the federal government should do is guarantee the insurance that has already been written, taking warrants in both companies, à la the successful Chrysler bailout of the eighties. If we are worried about the cost of those guarantees, we can limit it, allowing only a 50-cents-on-the-dollar payout on the insurance. With this guarantee in place, banks would be free to make the loans they can't afford to make now and get the economy moving again. Given the low rates that they would have to pay to depositors (they're also keyed to the federal-funds rate), banks could lend at 5 percent, a good deal for borrowers, and still make terrific profits that could be used to offset the losses they would have to take on the portion of their bad loans that are not guaranteed.

What about inflation? We only need a temporary dip in rates, just long enough to refinance everyone, then we can take rates back up again. Frankly, the mortgage mess is so deflationary it wouldn't hurt to have a few months of inflation.

Why hasn't a plan like this been suggested before? We have a Fed that only recently woke up to the crisis and is so ridiculously independent despite its obvious incompetence that it can't be counted on to take rates to levels that would make my plan work. When this problem is fixed, and rates are then brought up higher once refinancing is in place, Congress should investigate why the Fed keeps getting it wrong and whether the power and independence of these unelected academics is a good thing, considering their endless recklessness. Meanwhile, you can spend $150 billion making sure that the mall is jammed for a couple of Saturdays. Or you can spend virtually nothing by slashing rates and offering mortgage-insurance guarantees to banks and get the country moving within a matter of months. It's the free solution to a trillion-dollar problem that will never be cured by a bogus stimulus boondoggle.

What Will Hamas Do Next?

Breakout into Israel' ahead

Abraham Rabinovich, Jerusalem | January 26, 2008

A SENIOR Hamas official warned yesterday that the next breakout from the Gaza Strip could be into Israel, with 500,000 Palestinians attempting to march towards the towns and villages from which they or their parents fled or were expelled 60 years ago.

"This is not an imaginary scenario and many Palestinians would be prepared to sacrifice their lives," said Ahmed Youssef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.

Israeli minister Ze'ev Boim said the threat must be taken seriously in light of the successful Hamas breakout into Egyptian territory on Wednesday, adding: "We must learn from what has just happened there."

Egypt moved last night to end the great Gaza breakout, which had reverberated throughout the region as all sides tried to come to grips with its implications.

Egyptian security forces announced by loudspeaker in towns near the border with the Gaza Strip that it would be closed from 3pm (midnight AEDT), with an unknown number of Palestinians still in Egypt.

Riot police turned water cannon on Palestinians trying to cross into Egypt, despite Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak saying earlier that he would not allow the people of Gaza to starve.

Hamas, riding high on its operational success, sought to parlay it into political gain by seeking Egyptian approval for new border arrangements that would give Hamas for the first time a role in the vital crossing point at Rafah, between Gaza and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.

Israeli security officials said Hamas and other militant groups had already exploited the breach in the border wall to send "numerous" armed men into Sinai with the aim of infiltrating into Israel along the long, largely undefended, border between Sinai and Israel.

The Israeli road running the length of the border was yesterday shut to civilian traffic and the army deployed reinforcements in the area.

The officials said the militants were eager to hit back at Israel for heavy casualties in Israeli attacks in recent weeks and that attacks from Sinai were likely to come within the next two weeks.

Israeli civilians on vacation along Sinai's Red Sea coast were advised to return to Israel for fear Palestinian militants would try to seize them as hostages.

Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilna'i said yesterday the breakout into Egypt was an opportunity for Israel to rid itself of its responsibility to supply Gaza with electricity and water and to serve as a channel for Gaza's imports and exports.

"When Gaza is open to the other side we lose responsibility for it," he said. "We want to disconnect from it."

Egypt, however, has made it clear it does not want responsibility for the troublesome strip, whose Islamic militants are ideological partners of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. It particularly does not want indirect responsibility for the rockets fired from the strip into Israel.

The crossing point had been closed since Hamas's seizure of the Gaza Strip last June.

If Mr Mubarak were to allow new border arrangements with Hamas that would permit a free flow of people and goods, it would violate Egypt's agreement with the international "Quartet" -- the US, UN, European Union and Russia -- for a border terminal without Hamas involvement and with cameras permitting Israel to monitor the crossing.

However, Mr Mubarak would find it hard, not least for his image in the Arab world, to be seen as party to a renewed siege of the Palestinians.

Israel says it will continue its siege until the rocket firing ceases, with an invasion of Gaza a likelihood if the rocketing does not cease.

**********

Hamas challenges Egypt's bid to close Gaza border
Fri Jan 25, 2008 5:11pm EST

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Egyptian security forces greatly reduced their presence along the breached Gaza border late on Friday after Palestinian militants defied their attempts to seal the gaps by bulldozing a new opening.

Thousands of Palestinians crossed unhindered from Hamas-run Gaza as the Egyptians pulled back, rushing to stock up on food and fuel and shop for other goods which are in short supply because of Israel's blockade of the strip.

Adel Salman, an Egyptian government employee who lives near the border point said he had seen truckloads of police leaving.

"Palestinian movement is passing through the gate without any opposition from Egyptian security forces," Salman said.

An Egyptian security source said the forces pulled back from crossing points after a security man was shot and wounded.

Tens of thousands of Gaza Palestinians have crossed into Egypt since militants blew up a border wall on Wednesday to get around a blockade that Israel said it had imposed to try to counter cross-border rocket fire.

The fall of the Rafah wall has also punched a new hole in a U.S.-backed campaign to curb the clout of Hamas and strengthen Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, nearly eight months after the Islamist group routed Abbas's Fatah forces in Gaza.

The Egyptian government faces a difficult balancing act.

It does not want to be seen as aiding the Israeli blockade, but is under U.S. and Israeli pressure to take control. It also fears the spread of Islamist influence and the effects of becoming home to so many undocumented Palestinians.

On Friday, Egyptian forces began placing barbed wire and chain-link fences to stop more people crossing. But Hamas militants, cheered on by crowds of Gazans, used a bulldozer to flatten sections of the chain and concrete fence.

Tensions flared at one point when Palestinians threw stones at Egyptian police, who responded with batons and water cannon.

The Egyptian state news agency MENA said 22 Egyptian security men were injured while trying to contain the crowd. Egyptian security sources at the border said seven security men were injured, 6 by stones and one shot in the foot.

MUBARAK INVITATION

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in an interview to be published on Saturday, urged Hamas and Abbas's Fatah to end their differences and invited both sides to meet.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, speaking in Damascus, accepted the invitation. "I and all the brothers in the Hamas leadership welcome participating and will seek to make the dialogue a success," he told Reuters.

But a Fatah lawmaker in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Abbas holds sway, said talks would be a waste of time as long as Hamas continued to control Gaza.

"There is a Palestinian consensus that Hamas should give up its control of Gaza and fall into line with President Abbas, without this the talks would be a waste of time," lawmaker Abdallah Abdallah said.

Abbas has sought U.S. and Israeli support to take control of all of the border crossings, a move Hamas hopes to prevent.

By challenging Egyptian efforts to re-close the Gaza border, Hamas hoped to win assurances from Cairo that it would have a say in any future agreement to oversee the border crossings, including the one with Egypt at Rafah, Hamas sources say.

Israeli officials said Abbas planned to meet Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday, seeking support for controlling the crossings and for renewed peace talks despite the setbacks.

Citing the breach in Gaza's southern border, some top Israeli officials have advocated cutting Israel's remaining links with the coastal territory and putting the onus on Egypt.

Hamas sources said the group decided to open a new section in the border fence to increase pressure on Egypt.

Israel, which occupied Gaza in 1967, pulled out its troops and settlers in 2005 but still controls the strip's northern and eastern borders, airspace and coastal waters.

(Additional reporting by Mohamed Yusuf in Rafah, Yusri Mohamed in Ismailia, Egypt, and Cynthia Johnston in Cairo; and Avida Landau and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Adam Entous in Jerusalem; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

Mr. Musharraf's Busman's Holiday

Even as he tries to "get away" and rub shoulders with the world's movers and shakers in Davos, Pervez Musharraf's troubles mount in Pakistan.

Musharraf has been making the rounds of Europe, reassuring everyone that elections back home will be free, fair and transparent.

He says that Pakistan is a modern, nuclear country. Investors must know that Pakistan is stable and growing economically and is no "banana republic."

Musharraf says that the strategy against al-Qaeda is to "defeat them militarily. They have no right to be in Pakistan, they're foreigners. The Taliban are our own people and we must ween the population from militant Taliban. Secondly, do not allow any militant cross border movement and do not allow anyone to support cross border movement."

Musharraf says that there is total cooperation at both the strategic and tactical levels between US and Paki intelligence. There is total cooperation, he says, on both sides of the border. He says that al-Qaeda has been eliminated from Paki cities and valleys where they once numbered in the hundreds. Now, "in much smaller numbers," they are taking refuge in the mountains.

While he was away in Europe and his army was in the middle of a counter strike against high-jacking militants, Musharraf was blindsided by "some of his own." Retired senior Paki officers declared that Musharraf is the irritant in the umma and should step down. The question is, are these retirees speaking for themselves or do they represent the views of the active military as well?

Well, of course, every Islamo-moonbat knows he's our stooge and the statement by SecDef Gates (offering US help) probably didn't help Musharraf's cause but everyone's hoping that nothing will happen to derail the February parliamentary elections.

What happens after February? Well, we're taking one day at a time.

BTW - Don't miss the last paragraph of the article...

Pakistani Forces Battle Border Militants
Jan 25 09:52 AM US/Eastern
By SLOBODAN LEKIC
Associated Press Writer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani security forces backed by helicopter gunships and artillery targeted militant hide-outs in the country's northwest on Friday, killing up to 30 rebels, a military statement said.

Two paramilitary troopers also died in the attack on Dara Adam Khel, a town in North West Frontier province, a day after a group of suspected militants hijacked four truckloads of supplies including ammunition and other military materials.

Also on Friday, Pakistan's government responded angrily to a group of retired military commanders who appealed to President Pervez Musharraf to resign in order to promote democracy and combat religious militancy.

The timing of the call appeared designed to embarrass Musharraf, who was in Europe on a tour aimed at reassuring Western leaders about his ability to restore democracy and prevail in the escalating combat between government troops and Taliban rebels along Pakistan's mountainous border with Afghanistan.

Information Minister Nisar Memon described the retired military officials' call as unconstitutional, and said he was "dismayed at such lack of understanding of national issues by people who have held important positions in the past."

On Tuesday, Pakistan Ex-Servicemen's Society urged the U.S.-backed leader to resign immediately "in the supreme national interest," in a statement signed by more than 100 retired generals, admirals, air marshals, other senior officers and enlisted ranks.

Memon said that rather than issuing "irresponsible press statements," the group should focus on improving the welfare of retired military personnel.

On Friday, a former top intelligence official joined the calls for Musharraf to leave office, saying there was a "widespread belief in the country that you and your government has now become a huge part of the problem."

"While the army and paramilitary (forces) are deployed to fight in many parts of North West Frontier Province, the police and rangers are busy beating up civil society in the city streets," Masood Sharif, a former head of Pakistan's main domestic intelligence agency, said in a letter to the president.

While the group of retired servicemen does not speak for active officers, its tough stance could help erode military support for Musharraf, who was commander of the army until stepping down last month and whose popularity has waned considerably in the past year.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, where he was attending a meeting of the World Economic Forum, Musharraf described his critics as "insignificant personalities" whom he had dismissed from service.

He vowed that his government would carry on the fight against terrorism, and said parliamentary elections scheduled for Feb. 18 would be free and transparent.

This fall, Musharraf purged the Supreme Court which was poised to scupper his recent re-election by a pliant parliament and briefly suspended the constitution, setting back expectations of a restoration of democracy. The top court's chief justice remains under house arrest, along with other prominent judges and lawyers.

The political turmoil comes as Pakistan's army is increasingly engaged in combat with pro-Taliban militants in the tribal areas and other parts of North West Frontier Province.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Thursday that the United States was willing to send a small number of combat troops to Pakistan to help fight the insurgency there if Pakistani authorities asked for such help.

Gates said the Pakistani government has not requested any additional help in the weeks since al-Qaida and affiliated extremists have intensified their actions inside Pakistan. He stressed that the United States would respect the Pakistanis' judgment on the utility of American military assistance.

Also Friday, Pakistan successfully test-fired a medium-range, nuclear- capable ballistic missile, the military said, in one of the country's routine tests of the missiles in its arsenal.

______________________

Time flies. Last year at this time, Musharraf was in Davos with a new book out and I predicted that he was going to "cash in" and get out. He didn't. We didn't know then what would happen in the next year and we don't know what the coming year will bring. But one thing is for certain. We'll know more in six months.

Artificial Life is Not Artificial

..."Scientists are one step closer to constructing a living, synthetic organism that has the potential for social, economic, and ecological disruption - and society is not at all prepared for that."

As Tony Soprano once warned: "Once you join this family, there is no going back." Such will be the case with so-called artificial life. A movie is artificial life. You can turn it on and then off. Once the DNA is out of the bottle, it is not going back. Mankind has not been very adept at exotic species. Rabbits in Australia, gypsy moths in America, and the European introduction of various diseases to the Americas caused tremendous havoc and suffering. They were not artificial life as much as unfamiliar life. Aids is thought to be an exotic cross species invasion.

The term artificial life is half right and half wrong. It is life, created by humans and untempered and untried by time. When that life is introduced, it may be an opening to many wonderful things, but it may be the source of some exotic red tide that can go inter-continental and change the very nature of life as we know it. Once it joins our family, there is no going back.

____________________

Artificial life being created
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Telegraph
Last Updated: 7:01pm GMT 24/01/2008


Experiments to create the first man-made organism have started in the wake of the successful creation of the genetic code of a living thing from laboratory chemicals.

The first artificial genetic code - the software of life - and how to make it from scratch from four kinds of chemical is unveiled today by an American team, marking the completion of the second of three steps towards the dawn of synthetic life.



Sequence of images of the synthetic genome created by Craig Venter's team
Efforts to finish the final step of transplanting the synthetic DNA into a cell are under way, though it takes some weeks to work out if a transplant has been successful.

A team of 17 researchers at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, describes in the journal Science how it has successfully created the largest man-made DNA structure, indeed the largest synthetic molecule, the circular genetic code of an artificial bacterium that it is now trying to breed in the lab.

The scientists led by the human genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter want to create new kinds of bacterium, living chemical factories if you like, to make new types of bugs which can be used as green fuels to replace oil and coal, digest toxic waste or absorb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

The feat will trigger excitement and unease in equal measure along with widespread debate about the ethics of creating new species, which Dr Venter believes will be a major step in the history of our species. One critic of what some call Synthia put it more trenchantly: "God has competition."

Rumours have circulated for weeks that they have achieved the feat but, speaking from Davos, Switzerland, Dr Venter tells The Daily Telegraph: "No we have not. There are a number of serious constraints on that happening and we are working diligently to get rid of them.

If we had succeeded it would be part of this paper. As soon as we have it, I doubt that we would be able to keep it a secret. Nor would we want to."

But he believes success is only "a matter of time."

The genetic codes - genomes - of all organisms are written in the chemical language of DNA and Dr Venter's team used lab methods to make all 582,970 letters of a slightly modified version of the genome of a genital bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium JCVI-1.0.

The name underlines how Dr Venter wants to rewrite the software of life so it can still run on the hardware of an existing bacterial cell.

Standard methods can only make tiny DNA snippets. Today's technical tour de force, the fruits of an effort launched at the start of 2003, has created a huge ring of DNA that is more than 10 times bigger than earlier attempts, a milestone towards the goal of creating a fully-synthetic organism that is able to self replicate.

To achieve today's "very exciting" milestone, his team made DNA fragments in the lab into larger pieces using new methods for the assembly and reproduction of the DNA segments. After several years of work perfecting chemical assembly, the team found they could harness the process that cells use to repair damage to their chromosomes to complete the job.

The team, which now includes Dan Gibson, Clyde Hutchison and the Nobel laureate Ham Smith, has already started its attempt to create a living cell based entirely on the synthetic DNA code as part of an effort to find out which of its genes are essential for life, crucial for efforts to understand how life works.

"This extraordinary accomplishment is a technological marvel," said Dr Venter, paying tribute to his team that has "dedicated the last several years to designing and perfecting new methods and techniques that we believe will become widely used to advance the field of synthetic genomics."

The letters of DNA-- chemical building blocks called adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thiamine (T) - are not easy chemicals to artificially synthesise into chromosomes. As the strands of DNA get longer they get increasingly brittle, making them more difficult to work with.

Before today's publication, the largest synthesised piece of DNA contained only 32,000 letters of code. Ham Smith says: "We have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed." However, such work would use other kinds of bacteria.

Jim Thomas of the ETC group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) called on Dr Venter to slow down so that society could take on board the wider implications.

"Venter is claiming bragging rights to the world's longest length of synthetic DNA, but size isn't everything. The important question is not 'how long?' but 'how wise?'" says Thomas.

"While synthetic biology is speeding ahead in the lab and in the marketplace, societal debate and regulatory oversight is stalled and there has been no meaningful or inclusive discussion on how to govern synthetic biology in a safe and just way. In the absence of democratic oversight profiteering industrialists are tinkering with the building blocks of life for their own private gain. We regard that as unacceptable."

"The Venter Institute calls this synthetic life version 1.0 and acknowledges that it doesn't quite work yet - however, society shouldn't wait for the next upgrade - the stakes are far too serious," explains Kathy Jo Wetter of ETC Group.

"This news means scientists are one step closer to constructing a living, synthetic organism that has the potential for social, economic, and ecological disruption - and society is not at all prepared for that."

Hugh Hewitt & Rush Limbaugh

I enjoy listening to Hugh Hewitt. His radio show is intelligent and he draws from a broad spectrum that includes many thet he does not agree with. I agree with Hewitt much of the time, but not all. Rush Limbaugh is someone that is more of a used to be. There is rarely a surprise from Rush and he has become too much of a cult figure for my taste. He is the Paul McCartney of talk radio, a billionaire, someone I used to listen to, but of not much interest to me now.

Limbaugh and Hewitt are going all out against McCain and Huckabee. Does it really matter? I am not sure anymore. Talk to me.

Deal for economic rescue package closer

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

House Democratic and Republican leaders are looking for imminent agreement with the White House on an emergency package to jolt the economy out of its slump after negotiators on all sides made significant concessions at a late-night bargaining session.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to drop increases in food stamp and unemployment benefits during the Wednesday meeting in exchange for gaining a rebates of at least $300 for each person earning a paycheck, including low-income earners who make too little to pay income taxes.

Families with children would receive an additional $300 per child, subject to an overall cap of perhaps $1,200, according to a senior House aide who outlined the deal on condition of anonymity in advance of formal adoption of the whole package.

Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, had yet to reach agreement on a package of tax breaks for businesses after estimates showed a tentative business tax agreement could exceed $70 billion, far more than had been expected, the aide and a Democratic lobbyist said.

Pelosi and Boehner appeared optimistic as they left their third extended negotiating session of the day with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. "We'll have more to say tomorrow," Boehner said. "We're hopeful."

Kudos to Hamas

You've got to hand it to the Palestinians. No one knows how to manipulate the media and public opinion like they do. Two days ago, they were in the world's headlines pleading that the Israelis were threatening the lives of babies in hospital neo-natal units.

They set the stage, they rehearsed their parts, they followed their script and now they have successfully pulled off their latest production.

Egypt starts controlling Gazan crowds

By OMAR SINAN and SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago

Egyptian officials began trying to control the masses of Palestinians flooding from the Gaza Strip Thursday, stopping some from moving deeper into Egypt but not attempting to reseal the breached border.

Helmeted riot officers with dogs used batons to beat the hoods of Egyptian cars and trucks offering rides to Palestinians seeking goods in towns out of walking range.

Dozens of Egyptian guards pushed their way through the crowds but did nothing to halt the thousands of Palestinians moving over the wreckage of a metal wall brought down by explosives a day earlier.

"We are trying to organize the flow — incoming and exiting — of all these people," a guard who did not provide his name told a reporter walking through the passage from Egypt to Gaza.

U.S. and Arab officials said Wednesday that Egypt had assured the United States it would soon reseal its border with the Gaza Strip. An Arab diplomat said Egypt told the U.S. it expected the Palestinians' exodus from Gaza to end by midday Thursday, but a senior U.S. official said Egypt has not been precise about when it will stop the flow.

The crush of people at the border appeared to increase at midday, with Gazans saying they feared the Egyptian authorities would soon close the crossing.

"Everyone is rushing into Egypt before they seal it off," said Mohammed Abu Amra, a Palestinian man walking with crutches. He slipped and fell as he passed into Egypt.

"I fell because everyone is pushing, everyone is rushing," he said, dusting off his pants.

"The Egyptians started doing good deeds by letting us in. For God's sake, why don't they keep allowing us to pass through?"

Israel, meanwhile, said it would not send emergency shipments of fuel on Thursday, as it had initially promised earlier in the week. The fuel is needed to run Gaza City's power plant, which had shut down after Israel imposed a complete closure on Gaza last week, in response to rocket attacks.

The Palestinian Energy Authority said the Gaza plant would have to shut down again by Sunday, unless shipments are renewed.

An Israeli defense official said the border breach "reduces pressure on us a little" to provide the basics in Gaza. When Israel initially imposed a complete blockade last week, tacitly backed by Egypt, international aid groups voiced concern about an impending humanitarian crisis.

Israel is still trying to get clarification from Egypt on if and when it plans to close the border, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue.

In downtown Rafah, Palestinians could be seen buying cows, camels and horses and leading them back through the passage into Gaza. Men loaded with electronics equipment struggled to step through the broken opening.

Egyptian drivers idled their pickup trucks just inside Egyptian territory, charging incoming Palestinians $3.60 for a ride into downtown Rafah and neighboring El Arish.

Others carted cement bags, motorcycles, generators, gasoline gerrycans and canned food toward Gaza to be unloaded and handed over the border.

Several Egyptian armored vehicles towed cars away from a lot on the Egyptian side of the border, attaching ropes to empty pickups and dragging them hundreds of yards away.

Egyptian police were also deployed on main shopping thoroughfares and in alleyways in Rafah, but they did not attempt to force Palestinians to leave the city.

The border breach has been a boon to Hamas, the militant group whose hold on Gaza was made more difficult by border closures. The closures, which were tightened after Hamas seized control of Gaza by force in June, have led to severe shortages of cement, cigarette and other basic goods.

Hamas has used the border breach — which was carefully planned, with militants weakening the metal wall with blow torches about a month ago — to push its demand for reopening the border passages, this time with Hamas involvement. Such an arrangement would in effect end the international sanctions against the Islamic militants.

Hamas government spokesman Taher Nunu suggested Thursday that Hamas would seek a role in a future on the Gaza-Egypt border.

"An open border like this has no logic," he said. "We are studying the mechanism of having an official crossing point."

It appears unlikely Egypt will acquiesce. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has been under intense public pressure at home in recent days to alleviate the suffering of Gazans under blockade. However, Egypt would likely be reluctant to have an open border with a territory ruled by Islamic militants.

Israel, which withdrew from Gaza in 2005 after 38 years of occupation, has expressed concern that militants and weapons might be entering Gaza to bolster rocket launchings toward Israel, and said responsibility for restoring order lies with Egypt.

The United States also expressed concern about the border breach. Hamas called on its bitter rival, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, to help come up with new arrangements for Gaza's crossings.

Meanwhile, trucks and donkey carts pulled up to the Egyptian side, where goods were unloaded, carried across to the Gazan side and put in waiting trucks.

Gaza businessman Abu Omar Shurafa received a shipment of 100 tons of cement, seizing an opportunity to stock up before the border closes again.

"Everyone is exerting all efforts to stock the reserves for six to seven months. We have to find a way to continue living," he said.

Still, he was also hopeful that this could be the beginning of a new arrangement. "A solution has to be like this," he said, referring to the flow of goods from Egypt.

"We just want freedom," said Adel Tildani, who was bringing his mother-in-law from Egypt into Gaza to meet grandchildren she had never seen before. "I don't need to buy anything. Freedom is more important."

Hamdi al-Masri returned from Egypt to Gaza with several canisters of diesel fuel. He had walked more than six miles to reach an Egyptian town where fuel was not sold out.

Egyptian Ahmed Talaat, 23, crossed into Gaza to visit a sister he had not seen in six years. The town of Rafah was divided in two when Israel captured the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war, and crossing the border has become increasingly difficult over the years.

The opening of the border began before dawn Wednesday, when masked gunmen used 17 explosive charges to tear down the border wall — erected in 2001 by Israel when it controlled Gaza.

After news of the breach spread, people across Gaza boarded buses and piled into rickety pickup trucks heading for Egypt. It was a rare chance to escape Gaza's isolation.

By nightfall Wednesday, more than 1,000 Gazans had reached El-Arish, about 37 miles south of Rafah, walking the streets and shopping in stores that stayed open late.

Egyptian security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity since they were not authorized to talk to the media, said that Palestinians were not being allowed to travel further south than El-Arish.

Israeli tanks raided the northern Gaza Strip overnight and razed an area where militants launch rockets, the army said. Troops shot a Palestinian who fired an anti-tank missile at the forces, the army spokesman said. Israeli radio stations said the man was killed. Palestinian medics could not immediately reach the area to ascertain the man's condition.

Buchanan, Dobbs and Ron Paul Have it More Right Than Wrong.

The free ride on the back of the world reserve currency, the dollar, is over. We need a policy that favors savings and investment over spending and speculation. A policy that raises real wages and manufactures goods in the USA is a sensible and necessary strategy. In our hearts we knew something was wrong and it is. America first is not all that bad of an idea.


Lou Dobbs says U.S. leaders have squandered the nation's wealth.

NEW YORK (CNN) --

President Bush's assurances that we'll all be "just fine" if he and Congress can work out an economic stimulus package seem a little hollow this morning.

Much like Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's assurances last May that the subprime mortgage meltdown would be contained and not affect the broader economy. And it seems Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has spent most of the past year trying to influence Chinese economic policy rather than setting the direction of U.S. economic policy.

There is no question that Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will quickly come up with an economic stimulus package simply because they can no longer ignore our economic and financial crisis. That economic stimulus plan will amount to about 1 percent of our nation's gross domestic product, an estimated $150 billion.

But all of us should recognize that the stimulus package will be inadequate to drive sustainable growth in our $13 trillion economy. An emergency Fed rate cut and an economic stimulus plan are short-term responses to our complex economic problems, nothing more than bandages for a hemorrhaging economy.

Bush, Pelosi, Reid and the presidential candidates of both parties have an opportunity now, and I believe an obligation, to adjust the public policy mistakes of the past quarter-century that have led to this crisis. And only through courageous policy decisions will we be able to steer this nation's economy away from the brink of outright disaster.

We all have to acknowledge that our problems were in part brought on by the failure of our government to regulate the institutions and markets that are now in crisis. The irresponsible fiscal policies of the past decade have led to a national debt that amounts to $9 trillion. The irresponsible so-called free trade policies of Democratic and Republican administrations over the past three decades have produced a trade debt that now amounts to more than $6 trillion, and that debt is rising faster than our national debt. All of which is contributing to the plunge in the value of the U.S. dollar.

At precisely the point in our history in which this nation has become ever more dependent on foreign producers for everything from clothing to computers to technology to energy, our weakened dollar is making the price of an ever-increasing number of imported goods even more expensive.

All Americans will soon have to face a bitter and now obvious truth: Our national, political and economic leaders have squandered this nation's wealth, and the price of this profligacy is enormous, and the bill has just come due for all of us.

Bernanke endorsed the concept of a short-term economic stimulus package, but he cautioned that the money must be spent correctly: "You'd hope that [consumers] would spend it on things that are domestically produced so that the spending power doesn't go elsewhere."

Just what would you have us spend it on? The truth is that consumers spend most of their money on foreign imports, and any stimulus package probably would be stimulating foreign economies rather than our own. Imports, for example, account for 92 percent of our non-athletic footwear, 92 percent of audio video equipment, 89 percent of our luggage and 73 percent of power tools. In fact, between 1997 and 2006, only five of the 114 industries examined in a U.S. Business and Industry Council report gained market share against import competition.

And let's be honest and straightforward, as I hope our president and the candidates for president will be: This stimulus will not prevent a recession. It may ease the pain for millions of Americans, but a recession we will have. The question is how deep, how prolonged and how painful will it be. Unfortunately, we're about to find out how committed and capable our national leaders are at mitigating that pain and producing realistic policy decisions for this nation that now stands at the brink.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

Fred Thompson Ho Hums into History

He Will Get Over the Disappointment

Postmortem on the Thompson Campaign
Lee Cary American Thinker
January 22, 2008

The autopsy on the Thompson campaign will find that it succumbed to a host of -ion diseases: equivocation; expectation; communication; and perception.

Equivocation: Last summer the "will he or won't he" saga of Fred's potential entry into the presidential race was the political version of the play Waiting for Godot. Speculated deadlines came and went, and still no Fred. The summer storyline was a tease that became a snooze. Anticipation built, subsided, and built again - several times. And with each run-up to his possible entry into the race, the voting public cared just a little less. Equivocation does not play well with voters.

Expectation: Thompson's popularity as a TV and movie personality had us primed for a superstar candidate. We expected a real-life version of his portrayal of the confident and decisive D.A. on Law & Order. Of course, this was unfair of us, but not unexpected. Instead of standing behind a bank of microphones and boldly announcing his candidacy on the front steps of President Andrew Jackson's Hermitage Mansion, he filled a deep-sunk lounge chair on the Jay Leno Show and announced in a style meant to be laid-back. Instead, it played as laid-down.

Communication: After seven years of a President whose strength, even as his supporters will acknowledge, is not public speaking, we expected and hoped to be impressed with Fred's speeches. This, too, was unfair. In most of his acting roles, Fred was only called upon to deliver relatively short monologues. And even then, retakes were always an option. On Law & Order, Fred's character would typically listen to lawyers postulate, ask a question or two, and then render a concise and insightful judgment. In real-life, this is a skill valuable to any occupant of the Oral Office. But he didn't often display it on the campaign trail.

Fred was a disappointment as a platform speaker. He often held his hands in the classic "spiders-doing-pushups-on-a-mirror" position that conveys nervousness. He voiced frequent "hums" while he searched for his next words. And, when he was using a manuscript or notes, he looked down while saying the final (and often most important) words of a sentence while looking for what came next. In short, if he got professional presentation skills coaching he didn't heed it. Instead, he opted for his natural style, and natural didn't work.

Perception: Voters perceived Fred as a lethargic candidate. Sure, the media helped build that perception, but so did his behaviors. In the debates he engaged only intermittently. When he did, he was great! But he more often appeared disinterested. Perhaps it reflected his distain for the sound-bite addicted media. The reason is not important, only the impact. And the impact was that voters perceived him as detached from the fray. Not aloof or arrogant, just not engaged. As he failed to garner support, his unaltered laissez faire style deflected voters, who wanted to support him, toward other candidates.

Senator Fred Thompson was like a gifted sprinter who didn't seem to like running.

So he's left a race he never really entered.

The GOP will now pause for brief melancholic moment as the man who might have been an historic candidate goes home to Tennessee.

Nato Chooses to Win.

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists. Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."

Ian Traynor in Brussels
Tuesday January 22, 2008
The Guardian

Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.
"The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

The authors - General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and Nato's ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany's former top soldier and ex-chairman of Nato's military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defence staff in the UK - paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.

The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of Nato decision-taking methods, a new "directorate" of US, European and Nato leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU "obstruction" of and rivalry with Nato. Among the most radical changes demanded are:

· A shift from consensus decision-taking in Nato bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.

· The abolition of national caveats in Nato operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.

· No role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.

· The use of force without UN security council authorisation when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings".

In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that Nato's future is on the line in Helmand province.

"Nato's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan," said Van den Breemen.

"Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure," according to the blueprint.

Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance in Afghanistan. "The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner." By insisting on "special rules" for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to "the dissolution of Nato".

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as "a wake-up call". "This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we're in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges."

Naumann conceded that the plan's retention of the nuclear first strike option was "controversial" even among the five authors. Inge argued that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence".

Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west's cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.

Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was "puzzled".

"Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I'd be wary of saying it out loud."

Another senior EU official said Nato needed to "rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure".

Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. "Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don't know how to deal with this."

Nato needed to show "there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option", he said.

The Authors:

John Shalikashvili

The US's top soldier under Bill Clinton and former Nato commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.

Klaus Naumann

Viewed as one of Germany's and Nato's top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country's armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of Nato's military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.

Lord Inge

Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain's top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defence staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.

Henk van den Breemen

An accomplished organist who has played at Westminster Abbey, Van den Breemen is the former Dutch chief of staff.

Jacques Lanxade

A French admiral and former navy chief who was also chief of the French defence staff.

So Much Uncertainty in the World...

There is so much uncertainty in a world which desperately looks to leaders for guidance.

Sympathizers seek answers from al-Qaida

By LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writer1 hour, 34 minutes ago

Sympathizers submitted hundreds of questions to al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri's "on-line interview" before a recent deadline. Among them: Why hasn't al-Qaida attacked the U.S. again, why isn't it attacking the Israelis and when will it be more active in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria?

So far, there have been no answers.

Al-Qaida's media arm, Al-Sahab, announced in December that al-Zawahri would take questions from the public posted on Islamic militant Web sites and would respond "as soon as possible."

More than 900 entries — many with multiple questions — were posted on the main Islamist Web site until the cutoff date of Jan. 16. After the deadline, the questions disappeared from that site and no answers have yet appeared.

One thing is clear from the questions: Self-proclaimed al-Qaida supporters are as much in the dark about the terror network's operations and intentions as Western analysts and intelligence agencies.

Some of those posting questions sound worried: Does al-Qaida have a long-term strategy?

One, allegedly a former Arab al-Qaida fighter in Iraq, complained about Iraqi fighters discriminating against non-Iraqi mujahedeen.

Others wanted advice: Should followers be focusing their jihad, or holy war, against Arab regimes, or against Americans?

Like many in the West, the questioners appear uncertain whether al-Qaida's central leadership directly controls the multiple, small militant groups around the Mideast that work in its name, or whether those groups operate on their own.

Journalists also were invited to send questions and a few of the entries are labeled with the names of European and Asian newspapers. Diaa Rashwan, an Egyptian security expert in Cairo, also suggested some questions were probably submitted by intelligence agents looking for clues to al-Qaida's thinking, but there was no way to verify that.

The vast majority of questioners, identified only by their computer usernames, appear to be supporters of al-Qaida or the jihadi cause, often expressing praise for "our beloved sheik" and "the lion of jihad, Sheik Osama."

Many appear frustrated that al-Qaida is not doing more.

"When we will see the men of al-Qaida waging holy war in Palestine? Because frankly our situation has become very bad," writes one, with the username "Seeking the Path." "As for al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia," he asks, "are there efforts to revive jihadi action there after the blows that hurt us?"

Another, signed "Osama the Lion," asks: "Why doesn't al-Qaida open a front in Egypt, where there are wide opportunities and fertile ground for drawing in mujahedeen?"

Another, called "Knight of Islam," asks, "We are awaiting a strike against American soil. Why has that not been done? Why are the Jews in the world not struck?"

In videos over the past years, al-Zawahri has repeatedly spoken of opening new fronts against all those lands — but little has occurred. Saudi Arabia has waged a fierce crackdown that has killed or captured many in al-Qaida's branch there. In 2005, al-Zawahri announced the formation of a branch in his homeland, Egypt, but nothing has been heard of it, although Egypt has suffered terror attacks.

In his videos, al-Zawahri always depicts al-Qaida as moving steadily toward victory — something none of the questioners directly challenges. But they seem in need of reassurance, pressing for more specifics about al-Qaida's plans than al-Zawahri normally gives.

"I think they (al-Qaida's leaders) were aware (that) ... everyone was no longer buying into the propaganda about how great they are," said Jeremy Binnie of Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center. "This was put forward as a propaganda exercise and to make it look like they are responding to these concerns."

A few who write in claim to be active fighters in militant groups. One, with the username "Phenixshadow," says he is a member of the al-Qaida branch in North Africa that has been blamed for attacks in Algeria.

"What do you expect from us? Should we follow the instruction of the mother organization to target the 'far enemy' — the Zionist-Crusader (America) — or do we focus our efforts on the apostate regime (Algeria)? Or do you advise a middle path of striking both enemies?" he asks.

Another, signed "Alfirati60," says he is a Syrian who joined al-Qaida in Iraq before its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2006. The writer complains bitterly about al-Qaida's decision to form an umbrella group with other Iraqi insurgents known as "The Islamic State of Iraq."

"Things got worse after the organization joined the Islamic State, when Iraqis took over all the issues," he writes. The Iraqis care "only about liberating Iraq not about establishing God's law," an apparent reference to the al-Qaida goal of a single Islamic state.

"Indeed, they neglected many of the (non-Iraqi) brothers since they care only about the safety of Iraqis and Iraq."

"So I ask you, our sheik, is this just?" he writes. "There are many, many violations of Sharia Islamic law that those (Iraqis) who join the Islamic State commit, like failing to kill spies or apostates" — those who work with Americans — "because they are Iraqis."

He writes that he left Iraq and returned to "Sham," the old Arabic name for Syria and Lebanon. "I'm sorry to go on and on, our sheik, but you should be informed of what's going on" in Iraq, he says. "We want to act in the Sham, and we are ready to do so. We lack only the material and moral support from you."

It is impossible to confirm independently whether any of questioners are really active fighters. Nor is it possible to verify that the interview offer really came from al-Zawahri, although it was posted with the logo of Al-Sahab, which issues his videotapes.

But the questions focus on the same issues that Western terrorism experts have long debated, including how much direct support and command al-Zahwari and bin Laden give to militants in Arab countries and Europe.

"We hear a lot about the non-centralization of al-Qaida," one supporter writes. "Is the loss of direct control by al-Qaida's leadership over the jihadi cells harmful to al-Qaida? ... Does al-Qaida intend to try to reassert its control?"

Others want to make sure al-Qaida has a long-term strategy.

"Does it just go from event to event as some claim?" asks "Raji al-Quboul." "Do you have a body that studies events and reviews them to correct mistakes and assess them?"

Many, of course, ask about the health of bin Laden, who rarely appears on video.

Another hot topic is Iran. Several ask why al-Qaida does not attack the mainly Shiite nation. They express concern over rumors of an understanding between al-Qaida and Iran. "One of the lies spread to fight al-Qaida is that al-Qaida is linked to Iran," one writes. "They point to your failure to attack the Iranian regime."

Many others simply ask for advice on how and where to join jihad. One man says he is a 23-year-old living with his divorced mother.

"I want to travel to join jihad and I sought my mother's permission, but she would not give it to me," he says. "Can I go without her permission?"

___________________

Struggling with recent setbacks and severe losses, Al-Qaeda Inc. is looking for ways to reconnect, reinvent and regain market share. While Al-Qaeda tries to stay relevant, its acolytes seek reassurance and direction. Interesting...

Which Candidate Can Help Housing?

There is so much distortion in housing, one knows hardly where to begin to fix the problem. Some of it is structural. Too many overly large houses were built in almost every market. Do not be surprised to see many of them converted into twin units in the future.

No surplus dollar holders are going to start throwing money at housing again and make no equity loans. The problem is intensified by vanishing equity. It is inconceivable that housing prices will continue to go anywhere but south.

It will spill over to all parts of the economy. The reverse wealth affect will affect automobiles and consumer hard goods markets for some time. It is also hard to believe that presidential and congressional candidates are going to argue to permit markets to take their course. That will not happen. Someone will win the coming election. There is a real possibility and likelihood that someone will make things worse. Any ideas?


Overvalued homes discourage buyers
By Patrice Hill
January 21, 2008

Home prices are falling at a record pace and are down by 6 percent or more from their peaks, but economists say that may be just the beginning.

Computer models show that home prices remain as much as 50 percent too high in major cities, where even households with twice the U.S. median income of $47,845 often are unable to afford median home prices ranging from $400,000 to more than $600,000.

The overvaluation of homes has created a buyers strike as potential buyers sit on the sidelines waiting for prices to fall. How much prices have to drop to bring buyers back into the market has become a critical question for the housing market and the economy.

Hanging in the balance is not only the health of the housing and finance industries but also the accumulated wealth and chief asset of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who own their homes.

James Haffly, an Alexandria defense worker, would like to buy a house in the Washington area but thinks that prices are way too high and must come down substantially.

"Housing is out of reach for many folks here unless they have a rich relative," he said, noting that having a high-income, dual-earner family doesn't suffice anymore to buy a typical "starter" home for about $400,000.

He's hoping that the 1 million to 2 million foreclosures predicted nationwide this year will help to drive down prices to affordable levels.

"I mean, here we are at $125,000 a year, and to buy a home on the low end means spending 40 percent of our take-home pay. Something ain't right. I wouldn't buy in this market, not with rent amounts at half or less of what a house payment would be."


Mr. Haffly said he is willing to wait a year or more until prices fall to a level he can comfortably afford. Meanwhile, he can take advantage of the many good deals available on rental housing — sometimes offered by desperate real estate investors who are renting out properties to avoid foreclosure.

The eagerness of buyers to see prices drop puts them at odds with millions of homeowners and banks who financed home purchases and refinancings during the housing boom. These homeowners and lenders face big losses and even foreclosure if prices fall too far. The 5 percent to 25 percent drop in prices in some D.C. suburbs already has spawned record foreclosures and losses.

Ultimately, economists say, how far prices fall could be a critical factor determining whether the U.S. economy experiences only a mild downturn this year or a full-blown recession with wrenching dislocations for homeowners and bank failures that the nation hasn't experienced in nearly two decades.

"The underlying cause of the problems in the financial sector is a persistent fall in house prices," said John Makin, economist with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He expects prices to keep declining until next year for a cumulative reduction of 15 percent nationwide. Such a decline could involve much bigger drops in high-priced cities such as Washington.

Like many economists, Mr. Makin is concerned about the consequences of such big price drops. While it might make houses more affordable for first-time home-buyers, it is hurting homeowners who made a habit of tapping into their housing gains during the housing boom to finance an array of purchases from second homes to college educations. The home-fueled spending was an important impetus to economic growth in recent years.

"The drop in house prices has removed a large part of the elastic credit and wealth appreciation that helped to support consumption during the period of zero savings since the last recession in 2001," Mr. Makin said.

The tense standoff between buyers and homeowners is slowly playing out in the home sales market, where sales have fallen by half since 2006 as buyers wait for bigger price drops and better deals. Many homeowners are pulling their homes off the market rather than sell at steep discounts that buyers are demanding.

"Sellers continue to adjust their price expectations downward but not quickly enough to keep pace with declining demand," said Stephen Bedikian, research director at Real IQ, which tracks home prices in the top 20 U.S. markets.

The group found that price drops accelerated in high-priced cities such as San Francisco, San Diego and Washington at the end of last year after a credit crunch sharply restricted mortgage lending.

Three types of loans were particularly affected: jumbo mortgages of more than $417,000 needed to buy high-priced homes, loans for people attempting to buy homes with no down payment, and "subprime" borrowing by those with shaky credit.

Mr. Haffly puts himself in the latter two categories. He and his wife are attempting to repair their credit after problem credit-card debt put them into a troubled category. On top of that, they would need to finance 100 percent of their home purchase because they have not saved enough for a down payment.

The difficulty buyers are having getting loans is making it harder and even impossible for some to buy high-priced homes, putting further pressure on sellers to lower prices, analysts say.

David A. Levy, head of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center in Mount Kisco, N.Y., estimates that house prices have to fall from 30 percent to 50 percent from their peaks now that many of the loan products that made homes affordable to first-time buyers have disappeared.

Estimates of how far prices must fall often are based on the historic relationship between home prices and rents. A model comparing the monthly cost of renting versus homeownership in major U.S. cities developed by RBS Greenwich Capital finds home prices overvalued by 24 percent in the D.C. area and 16 percent nationwide at the end of last year.

Among the biggest losers as prices continue to drop are banks and brokerages, which have provided mortgage financing for much of the nation's $23 trillion housing stock. Mr. Makin estimates a 15 percent drop in home prices would cause a $3.5 trillion loss of home values nationwide.

Such a gigantic loss eclipses the $1 trillion of capital banks and brokerages have on hand to offset their share of the losses, he said. Because of that, he predicts banks will be scrambling to shore up their finances — and as a result restricting lending to consumers and businesses — for some time to come.

Their troubles will weigh on the economy, which Mr. Makin expects to fall into recession. He also thinks that bank losses will lead to failures of some financial institutions and an eventual federal bailout of bank depositors that will eclipse the 1980s savings and loan bailout in size.

"This time, the cost — even excluding shareholders — could run to $500 billion," he said

Mac is Back. McCain Wins in South Carolina.

Short of a miracle, Rudy Giuliani is done. Florida will determine that. Huckabee has probably eclipsed and that leaves Mitt Romney, who picked up more delegates in Nevada than McCain did in South Carolina, to be the only candidate who can challenge McCain. The non dd214 wing of the Republican Cardinals detests McCain, but like an old Timex he takes a licking and ticks on. McCain disappointed many over immigration but the choices are narrowing.

We live in interesting times.

Don't call it Bluegrass

Saturday night
at the Elephant Bar

More Uncle Earl

"My yesterday was blue dear. Today I am a part of you dear."

The Battle of Lepanto

Homeland Security Michael Chertoff recently stirred up a controversy in Europe when he revealed that the US is worried about Islamic terrorists using legal loopholes to enter the US from Europe.

___________________

BBC NEWS

US fears Europe-based terrorism

Published: 2008/01/15

One of the biggest threats to US security may now come from within Europe, US Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff has told the BBC.

He said militant attacks and plots in Europe over recent years had made the US aware of the "real risk that Europe will become a platform for terrorists".

Mr Chertoff said it was likely security checks on travelers from Europe would be increased.

But he said steps would be taken to ensure travel and trade were not hit.

In the interview on the BBC's World News America, Mr Chertoff said he had seen "home-grown terrorism begin to rise in Europe".

I have to say the biggest threat comes from overseas, and one of the places we are increasingly worried about is Europe" Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary.

He cited deadly bomb attacks on Madrid and London, and a terror alert affecting UK-US flights in August 2006, as well as "people travelling from South Asia and the Middle East into Europe and carrying out attacks there".

He said it was important to increase security checks on passengers from Europe - most of whom are currently able to enter the United States without being screened first because of a visa waiver programme.

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Today, we learn what he may have had in mind.

January 19, 2008

Spain Arrests 14 Suspected Islamic Militants in Barcelona

By The ASSOCIATED PRESS

MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Spanish police on Saturday arrested 14 people suspected of links with Islamic terrorism, the prime minister and Interior Ministry said.

Civil Guard officers made the arrests in the northern port city of Barcelona as part of raids planned with the National Intelligence Center, the Spanish equivalent of the CIA, a ministry statement said.

Authorities did not rule out more arrests, the ministry said.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero confirmed the report to journalists and said the investigations continued.

Officials gave no further information, but the newspaper El Pais said on its Web site that officers searched a mosque, several homes and an unofficial prayer site.

Most of those so far detained were believed to be Pakistani nationals, Europa Press Agency said, while Spanish TV news channel CNN+ reported that traces of chemicals that could be linked to explosive material had been seized for analysis.

Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba was due to give more details at a midday news conference, the ministry said.

Europe's worst Islamic-linked terror attack took place in Spain on March 11, 2004, when bombs went off in railway carriages during the morning rush hour near Madrid's Atocha station. The attack killed 191 people injured more than 1,800. Twenty-one people have been convicted of involvement in that attack.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, Spanish police have arrested hundreds of Islamic terrorism suspects, many in connection with the Madrid attack.

In recent years police have focused on cells suspected of recruiting mujahedeen fighters and suicide bombers, or of collecting money to finance Al-Qaida-linked groups abroad.

The train attacks were claimed by Muslim militants who said they had acted on behalf of al-Qaida to avenge the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, but Spain's courts found no evidence al-Qaida ordered or financed the attacks.

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In this case, the perps are Pakis living in Spain. From an Investors Business Daily Editorial:

Unlike other foreign visitors, visa-waiver travelers are not required to disclose their place of birth, any previous citizenship or their visa history. These are key counter-terror indicators often denied U.S. security officials as they process European travelers.

While they can augment inspections at the airports, they still for the most part are blind to high-risk passengers boarding flights on the other side of the pond. Which makes in-bound flights a risk to both passengers and any likely targets in the flight's path.

Posing the greatest threat right now are Muslim citizens from Britain who were born in Pakistan or who recently have traveled to that al-Qaida hotbed.

Pakistan-based al-Qaida is targeting for recruitment not only citizens of visa-waiver countries, but also ethnic Pakistanis who can easily travel back and forth to Pakistan for training.

It's no coincidence that Pakistani Britons were behind the 2006 foiled plot to blow up 10 airliners over U.S. cities, which was staged out of London.

It's not for nothing that the so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid is British and got his training in Pakistan.

Three of the 7-7 London bombers were of Pakistani origin, it's worth adding, and could have used the waiver scheme to enter the U.S.

Some 800,000 British citizens are of Pakistani descent, providing al-Qaida with a huge potential pool from which to recruit terrorists. Al-Qaida reportedly has set up a branch of operations in the U.K.

The terror group may have found one of the weakest points in our security network. Who would have thought the biggest terror threat to America would come by way of our biggest ally?

The good news is Chertoff sees the loophole. Bad news: Nobody seems to know how to close it.

Washington has been persuaded that changes in the visa-waiver program would slow tourism and cause economic damage to both the U.S. and Europe.

Chertoff wanted to impose restrictions on British citizens of Pakistani origin, but London strongly resisted.

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But we also have problems with the Wahhabists, the Iranian mullahs, the Taliban, Jemaa Islamiyah and countless other Islamist malcontents. Hmm, could these disparate groups have anything in common?

London has strongly resisted common sense restrictions that would "profile" some of their fine citizens and apparently there is a growing resistance movement in Washington. Both IBD and Diana West have recently addressed the problem of political correctness which we seem incapable, so far, of overcoming. From the IBD editorial:

The mandate to wage jihad is also taught, still, in Saudi school textbooks, Coughlin says, and explains why the home to Islam's holiest shrines is the No. 1 foreign supplier of suicide bombers in Iraq.

"The first 'radicalizing' lesson that Saudi youth receive that motivates them to travel to Iraq and fight coalition forces does not come from 'extremist' groups like al-Qaida," he observed, "but rather is taught as part of Saudi Arabia's standard secondary school curriculum."

Bottom line: "The enemy is driven by Islamic law," he warned — not poverty, lack of education or other socioeconomic factors often used by official Washington and the punditry to blur the demonstrable link between Islamic devotion and terror.

Unfortunately, Coughlin's critical findings were too politically hot for Pentagon brass trying to make nice with Muslim groups at the urging of Muslim aides involved with them. So instead of the aides, he got the boot, which is outrageous but not surprising for Washington.

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The IBD editorial also points out that Hesham Islam, an aide to the PC Defense Secretary Gordon England was Coughlin's nemesis. IBD says Islam took great offense over briefings Coughlin "...prepared for the U.S. military warning that major U.S. Muslim groups were fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt. " According to IBD, "...Islam who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups — the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case."

Chertoff better pick and choose his words carefully and if the trends continue, so should we.

Down on your knees now.

Hats off to Obama

It is election day in South Carolina. The process continues and the way it looks from here is that in the general election, Barack Obama would be the strongest Democratic candidate. Doug on the previous thread posted this:

doug said...

Obama running against two phoniest Democrat losers on the Planet.
---
Weak End Update [Mark Steyn]
This is pretty good knockabout:

Obama began by recalling a moment in Tuesday night's debate when he and his rivals were asked to name their biggest weakness. Obama answered first, saying he has a messy desk and needs help managing paperwork - something his opponents have since used to suggest he's not up to managing the country.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said his biggest weakness is that he has a powerful response to seeing pain in others, and
Clinton said she gets impatient to bring change to America.

"Because I'm an ordinary person, I thought that they meant,
'What's your biggest weakness?'"

Obama said to laughter from a packed house at Rancho High School.
"If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street.
Sometimes they don't want to be helped.
It's terrible.'"

Game, set, match, Obama!

Sat Jan 19, 03:22:00 AM EST

President Speaks Stimulus. Market Not Assured .

I listened to the President's talk about a stimulus package and it sounded a little too much of the "my way or the highway" tone to it. The market must have felt the same and the nice gain in the morning headed south of Crawford. Why can't he pick up the phone and have the Europeans, Brits and the US Central Bank all notch a point off the interest rates? That would neutralize the currency swing and put some juice into the economy.

A stimulus package will end up being a pig's breakfast. It is also time to start getting tough with the Gulf OPEC cartel. They get all that free US protection. Maybe two or three aircraft carriers returning to California would give them something to think about.



U.S. stock rally fades as financials lead slump
President Bush's talk of fiscal stimulus fails to cheer investors

By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
Jan. 18, 2008

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. stocks on Friday erased early gains, with financials weighing on the market as new concerns about bond insurers overtook cheer that came with solid quarterly results from International Business Machines Corp. and General Electric Co.

Talk from President Bush on the need for a fiscal stimulus package failed to bolster sentiment. See full story.
"Most people know this is just political noise; our problems are a lot bigger than this," said Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak.

Russia Returning to the Soviet Era.

Taifun class sumarines at Murmansk. This can handle 200 missiles.

Murmansk spent nuclear store area

Murmansk ship dump

Murmansk Soviet fleet wrecks

Murmansk ships

You have to go back to Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" declaration to find a more spectacular and ridiculous statement than George Bush's soul seeing assessment of Vladimir Putin. Hardly a month goes by without Putin coming up with another example to remind the world about the real story in Putin's soul.

Russia has some of the worst environmental disasters on the planet.

Many of these are from military nuclear wrecks and wrecked nuclear weaponry. Mr. Putin would be more impressive if he cleaned up some of the worst of these areas, especially those involving spent nuclear fuel, instead of using new found energy wealth to revive strategic weaponry and icons from the Soviet era.

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Russia revives military boast of Soviet days
By David R. Sands Washington Times
January 18, 2008

Reviving yet another iconic image from Soviet days, Russia's military announced plans to stage a parade of ballistic missiles, tanks and platoons of soldiers this May through the Kremlin's Red Square.

The display of military hardware, the first of its kind since 1990, will be held May 9, the day Russians mark the victory over Germany in World War II, and could coincide with the inauguration of Dmitry Medvedev, close aide to outgoing President Vladimir Putin, as Russia's new leader.

Similar displays, typically held May 1, were a high point of the old Soviet calendar, with leaders such as Josef Stalin and other top Communist Party figures perched on the reviewing stand above Lenin's Tomb to witness the country's military prowess and send a message to the Soviet Union's Cold War adversaries.

The announcement comes at a time of rising tension between Russia and the West, on issues ranging from a planned U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, to human rights to the future of Serbia's Kosovo province. Mr. Putin also has struggled to rebuild Russia's military forces, which deteriorated badly in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse.

"You can't teach an old imperial bear new tricks," said Ariel Cohen, a Russian specialist at the Heritage Foundation. "The current regime's craving for international prestige is as high as the insecurity of its rulers."

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday accused Moscow of following the old, hostile Soviet pattern in an escalating dispute over Russia's order that two British cultural outreach offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg be shut down. Russia claims the centers are operating illegally, but Mr. Miliband said Russian authorities were trying to intimidate the British employees.

"We saw similar actions during the Cold War, but frankly thought they had been put behind us," Mr. Miliband told the House of Commons.

According to Russia's Interfax news agency, the May 9 parade lineup will include the newest version of the Topol-M SS-27 intercontinental ballistic missile, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and 6,000 troops decked out in a newly designed uniform.

Mr. Putin has made restoring Russian national pride and reclaiming some of its lost international influence central to his presidency.

He revived a reworked version of the old Soviet anthem as Russia's new national anthem and once called the collapse of the old Soviet empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."

With Mr. Putin's endorsement, Mr. Medvedev is expected to win the March 2 presidential vote handily. He already asked Mr. Putin to serve as his prime minister.

The official May Day parades were discontinued after 1990. In recent years, the day has been marked in Moscow and other cities primarily by protest marches by the declining Communist Party and by right-wing nationalist parties.

President Boris Yeltsin began staging military parades — without the weaponry — through Red Square in 1995, the first one marking the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe.

Pavel Felgenhauer, a Russian military analyst for the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, said the revived display is one of a number of recent symbolic moves by the country's military. They include the resumption of strategic bomber patrol flights over the Atlantic and Pacific in August and plans for major naval exercises in the Mediterranean for the first time since 1991.

Mr. Felgenhauer noted that the traditional route for the May parade must now be altered in part because of the construction of a new shopping mall.

"One can only hope that ... no ancient building will collapse as tanks and ICBMs roll into central Moscow to serve the vanity of Russia's leaders," he said.

The Limitless Beauty of Woman

Shape of flower

There are universal and timeless pleasures in life. You can appreciate many of them with nothing more than a glance. Sometimes you even get a glance back. I had this photo for some time and have been waiting for an opportunity to use it. By coincidence and looking for something quite different, I found this little news clip about the artist photographer. Nothing more than that.

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Vietnamese artist wins with nudity
03:23' 17/01/2008 (GMT+7)

VietNamNet Bridge –

Photographer Quoc Dinh won a gold medal at Japan’s international Asahi Shimbun photo contest in 2005 for “Life’s Medium” and another gold for “Afternoon Dream” in 2007. Both winning works were nude photographs.

Asahi Shimbun is a reputable annual photo contest which attracts nearly ten thousand photos on average. Quoc Dinh has surprised the local photographic circle because within two years working as a professional photographer, he won four international prizes, all of which were nude photos.

Quoc Dinh recently sent four nude photos to the 61st Hong Kong International Photo Contest, which received nearly 10,000 photos from around the world. All of his four photos won a prize: Autumn Color got a gold medal, Shape of Flower got a gold as well, Aspiration and Two Artworks won bronze medals.

Quoc Dinh was born in 1967 and graduated from the Dong Nai Provincial Art College. After ten years earning his living from paintings, he became a photographer in 2004. In two years, 2002-2004, he has received 16 domestic and international prizes.

Regarding nude photos, Dinh said he is also a painter so he is able to feel the perfect beauty of women, and he wants to honor the beauty of the female body. Women in Dinh’s nude photos are mainly normal girls, not professional models.

Some senior photographers advised Dinh to not focus on nude photos because this is a sensitive medium. Moreover, international photographers have walked this area carefully. But Dinh thinks women’s beauty is limitless and he has succeeded with his art.

Who is Barack Obama?

You can't judge a book by its cover.
You can judge a man by the company he keeps.

But, what about his church? Is it off limits? Only to a politically correct idiot.

Why have the media given Obama a pass on the issue of his church and religious views?

_____________________

Obama's Church

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, January 15, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election 2008: Since we first drew attention to Barack Obama's Afrocentric church a full 12 months ago, other media have weighed in. And additional disturbing information has come to light.

Related Topics: Election 2008

At the core of the Democratic front-runner's faith — whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian or some mixture of the two — is African nativism, which raises political issues of its own.
The Rev. Wright in the pulpit at Trinity: 'True to the mother continent.'

The Rev. Wright in the pulpit at Trinity: 'True to the mother continent.'

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks.

It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races.

The code also warns blacks to avoid the white "entrapment of black middle-classness," suggesting that settling for that kind of "competitive" success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them "captive" to white culture.

In short, Obama's "unashamedly black" church preaches the politics of black nationalism. And its dashiki-wearing preacher — who married Obama and his wife and now acts as his personal spiritual adviser — is militantly Afrocentric. "We are an African people," the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reminds his flock, "and remain true to our native land, the mother continent."

Wright once traveled to Libya with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan to meet with terrorist leader Muammar Qaddafi. Last year at a Chicago gala, Wright honored his old pal Farrakhan, who's fond of calling whites "blue-eyed devils," for lifetime achievement.

It comes as little surprise then that Wright would think Israel a "racist" occupier of Palestinians, while describing the 9/11 attacks as a "wake-up call" to "white America" for ignoring the concerns of "people of color."

Wright makes the Rev. Jesse Jackson look almost moderate and patriotic. Yet this is whom Obama picked to baptize his daughters, plus to act as his "sounding board" during his presidential run.

The candidate already has heeded his church's "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa," spending an inordinate amount of his campaign time on the Kenyan crisis, for one. Obama has close family ties to Kenya, and even founded a school in his ancestral village — the Senator Obama School.

In the bloody conflict there, which already has claimed some 700 lives, Obama appears to have sided with opposition leader Raila Odinga, head of the same Luo tribe to which Obama's late Muslim father belonged.

Obama's older brother still lives there. Abongo "Roy" Obama is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim who argues that the black man must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture." He urges his younger brother to embrace his African heritage.

Beyond family politics, these ties have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.

Odinga is a Marxist who reportedly has made a pact with a hard-line Islamic group in Kenya to establish Shariah courts throughout the country. He has also vowed to ban booze and pork and impose Muslim dress codes on women — moves favored by Obama's brother.

With al-Qaida strengthening its beachheads in Africa — from Algeria to Sudan to Somalia — the last thing the West needs is for pro-Western Kenya to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists.

Yet Obama interrupted his New Hampshire campaigning to speak by phone with Odinga, who claims to be his cousin. He did not speak with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki.

Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. interests?

It's a valid question, and one voters deserve to have debated regardless of the racial and religious sensitivities. Thanks to a media blackout of these issues, the electorate has yet to benefit from a thorough vetting of Obama.

We have to wonder how much of the national agenda Africa would consume under an Obama administration. Of the six "world threats" Obama lists in stump speeches, at least half of them concern that chronically troubled Third World continent.

Yes, some of his African priorities are noble, such as fighting AIDS and genocide. But how much U.S. aid, resources and presidential time would he devote to them? How much is enough? If Bill Clinton was America's "first black president," would Barack Hussein Obama be our first president for Africa?

Then there is the issue of his Muslim past. Obama, 47, was raised by two Muslim fathers and attended Islamic classes in Indonesia.

He denies being Muslim, however, and says he "embraced Christ" while answering the altar call 20 years ago at Trinity. (Contrary to anonymous e-mail rumors circulating, Obama never took the oath of office on the Quran. He used a Bible, and Vice President Dick Cheney swore him in during his Senate ceremony.)

This merely raises another concern, beyond that of the controversial church he chose to baptize him. If Obama were ever Muslim, even as a youth, he would now be viewed as an apostate, which in radical Islam is punishable by death. As Mideast expert Daniel Pipes has noted, a President Obama could be the target of a fatwah.

Still, his Muslim heritage is not the signal issue before the electorate. It's his Afrocentric church, which preaches black socialism and black nativism, and his family ties to an African tribe that's fanning the flames of Marxism and militant Islam in a country once considered strongly democratic and a friend of the U.S.

"I believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change," Obama has asserted. He also says his faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market."

If a President Obama's foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he's pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class.

$ Two trillion in Gulf States foreign assets by end 2008

Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai is the only existing 7-star luxury hotel in the entire world.

It is very heart warming to see the results of US military protection in the Middle East. We have come a long way from US soldiers handing out candy to grateful European children in broken cities and rubble strewn streets. Why are we protecting this?

I do not begrudge the Gulf States getting rich because we are so foolish to believe in economic models that do not include energy independence.

I do wonder why we give away military protection for nothing, and cannot get Arab states to police other Arab states.

I do get angry when I see the squalid streets of Afghanistan and the perpetual open sewer of Palestine and listen to the reasoning that it is always an American responsibility. It isn't and it never was.

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Gulf states’ foreign assets to top $2,000bn

By Simeon Kerr in Abu Dhabi Financial Times
January 16 2008

The net foreign assets of Gulf Arab states are set to rise to more than $2,000bn by the end of this year on rocketing oil prices, according to new research. The Institute of International Finance said the region’s public and private overseas wealth stood at $1,800bn (€1,211bn, £916bn) at the end of 2007.

“High oil prices are enabling the GCC [Gulf Co-operation Council] governments to place a growing volume of resources into reserve and wealth management funds, which will play increased roles in international financial markets,” said Charles Dallara, managing director of the IIF, a Washington-based association representing global financial institutions.

Sustained high oil prices will generate more capital spending and foreign investment as the GCC’s combined current account surplus should exceed $250bn in 2008, up from $215bn in 2007. Most of the foreign assets are controlled by sovereign wealth funds. The IIF said a slowdown in the US economy could cause a knock-on effect on global oil demand, causing prices to soften and a drop in GCC government revenues. However, the IIF believes that ongoing infrastructure investment among the six-member grouping should provide enough economic momentum for nominal growth to continue at 8 to 10 per cent in 2009.

But the report warned of serious inflationary pressures. Inflation in the GCC reached a 15-year high of 5.3 per cent in 2006, likely rising to 6.7 per cent in 2007, according to official figures that may understate price pressures.

While supply-side bottlenecks amid rampant population growth were driving up inflation, the report said: “The situation is being aggravated by policy shortcomings.” With five members of the GCC fixing their currencies to the US dollar, the region has few monetary options to stem liquidity growth as central banks are forced to track lower interest rates while the region booms.

The GCC’s nominal gross domestic product of $900bn in 2008 is more than double the amount registered in 2003. The region’s external debt is estimated to have reached $226bn in 2007, a three-fold rise on 2003, but at 28 per cent of GDP, the IIF described the aggregate ratio of debt as benign.

Hydrocarbons continue to form the bulk of the GCC’s wealth, accounting for 77 per cent of 2007 export earnings, up from 73 per cent in 2002. Oil export receipts reached $381bn in 2007, 8 per cent higher than in 2006, while natural gas revenues rose 18 per cent in 2007 to $26bn, driven by gas-rich Qatar.

But the private sector was playing an increasingly important role in the region’s latest petrodollar surge with the GCC’s non-oil sector growing this year at 14 per cent in nominal terms, the report said. Public expenditure had fallen from an average of 34 per cent in 2002 to 29 per cent in 2007.

While non-oil growth was providing job opportunities, most of these positions were taken by expatriate workers.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Groveling For Oil and Dollars

Is that it? Has the lack of a US policy on reducing dependence on foreign oil brought us to these immortal words by George Bush,

"Oil prices are very high, which is tough on our economy."

These are the words that will be left in the ears of our Saudi friends? Combine this with US bankers looking for capital in all the wrong capitols and the world sees a very pathetic reduction in US power and prestige.

Common sense should have warned us that a policy that gutted US manufacturing and disregarded the worldwide trends in energy supply and demand would be trouble. Add an unsustainable investment in housing and we now have the results, the US begging and borrowing for oil and capital. Not pretty.

__________________
Cutting up.

Saudis tightlipped on Bush oil appeal
By Daniel Dombey in Riyadh and Javier Blas in London Financial Times
January 16 2008

Ali Naimi, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, yesterday said that US president George W. Bush had "every right" to call for increased oil production to damp the effect of $100-a-barrel prices on the US economy. But Mr Naimi would not be drawn on whether his country or the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries would favour such a step.

Opec, the oil cartel, will discuss its production policy on February 1 in Vienna after leaving unchanged its output ceiling in December in spite of record oil prices.

Responding to remarks by Mr Bush, who is staying with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, Mr Naimi said: "Presidents and kings have every right, every privilege, to comment or ask or say whatever they want." He added: "The concern for the US economy is valid but what affects the US economy is more than the price of oil." Venezuela and Iran have already said the cartel should not increase its output. Mr Naimi was tightlipped about its preference ahead of the Opec meeting, only saying: "We will raise production when the market justifies it."

He warned oil demand could rise this year as little as 900,000 barrels a day, below the US government estimate of a 1.6m b/d rise, suggesting a cautious approach. Brent IPE oil yesterday fell nearly $2 to $90.98 a barrel on renewed fears that the US economy is heading into recession.

Earlier yesterday, Mr Bush told a meeting of Saudi entrepreneurs that he was planning to raise the issue with King Abdullah last night. He added: "Oil prices are very high, which is tough on our economy."

White House officials said the previous day they did not know whether Mr Bush would address the topic with King Abdullah. But the high oil price is a sensitive political topic ahead of the presidential elections.

The Bush White House has been far less vocal than the Clinton administration in asking Opec to increase its production, partly as it acknowledged that the cartel, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, is pumping at full capacity.

Riyadh has often ignored US calls for more oil supply, although it lobbied other Opec members to raise production in September.

Mr Naimi blamed speculators for adding an extra $20-$30 a barrel to the price of oil.

Chakib Khelil, Opec president and Algeria's oil minister, warned that Opec would have to be careful before raising its output. "The spectre of a recession in the world economy is still looming over the oil market," Mr Khelil was quoted as saying by the Algerian news agency.

Iran is Disneyland Compared to Pakistan

General Ashfaq Kayani, center, succeeded Mr. Musharraf as chief of the army and previously led the ISI, Pakistan's premier military intelligence agency. (ISPR via Reuters)


The constituency that is intent on bitch slapping Iran may well take heed of the disaster seeping to the surface in Pakistan. Exaggerating the threat of Iran and ignoring the danger in Pakistan is foolishness in the extreme. Want a worse case scenario? Waste assets in Iran and watch Pakistan unravel and be able to do nothing to stop it.  

We do not seem to have the domestic sources of capital to shore up our own banks yet we burned $10 billion to pay tribute in Pakistan to little good effect. We are borrowing and burning billions by the hundred count to finance the Iraq venture. Oil, that by some accounts was to have financed the Iraq war, now costs the US consumer close to $100 a barrel. Further US actions and policies in the ME should be tempered by past results and  current realities rather than the future fantasies of our rulers and masters.

__________________________

Militant groups slip from Pakistan's control

By Carlotta Gall and David Rohde Published: January 15, 2008 Herald Tribune

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: Pakistan's premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks this year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda's global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan's security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.

The unusual disclosures regarding Pakistan's leading military intelligence agency — Inter-Services Intelligence, or the ISI — emerged in interviews last month with former senior officials who have knowledge of the inner workings of the ISI. The disclosures confirm some of the worst fears, and suspicions, of American and Western military officials and diplomats.

The interviews, a rare glimpse inside a notoriously secretive and opaque agency, offered a string of other troubling insights likely to refocus attention on the ISI's role as Pakistan moves toward elections on Feb. 18 and a battle for control of the government looms:

One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan's last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Musharraf had now ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of new meddling.

The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.

None of the former intelligence officials who spoke to The New York Times agreed to be identified when talking about the ISI, an agency that has gained a fearsome reputation for interfering in almost every aspect of Pakistani life. But two former American intelligence officials agreed with much of what they said about the agency's relationship with the militants.

So did other sources close to the ISI, who admitted that the agency had supported militants in Afghanistan and Kashmir, although they said they had been ordered to do so by political leaders.

The former intelligence officials appeared to feel freer to speak as Musharraf's eight years of military rule weakened, and as a power struggle for control over the government looms between Musharraf and opposition political parties.

Read On

Housing Slump Over, Economy Improving- In Iraq

Economic boost gives hope to Iraqis
12 January 2008 BBC

House prices on the up and increased banking business are not readily associated with Iraq. Yet as Humphrey Hawksley reports, there are entrepreneurs who see good times in the horizon.

"This is the entrance hall," said Naimah Abdul Jabbah, throwing open a huge pair of wooden double doors.

"How much?", I asked.

"$1m. Maybe some negotiation. But $1m, I reckon."

He turned to my interpreter to confirm the dollar exchange rate to the dinar, because in recent months Iraq's currency has been creeping up in value.

Business playground

Naimah, in his early 40s, is a leading Iraqi estate agent.

He took over the business from his father and talks of the glory days of the 1980s when Iraq dreamt of becoming a business centre and a playground of the Middle East. He now sees a glimpse of the good times coming back again.

We were in a large detached house in a fashionable Baghdad suburb, standing under a dust-caked chandelier and next to floor-to-ceiling windows with the top half blocked out in case of a rocket attack or bombing.

"Since the drop in violence," I asked "how much have prices gone up?"

Dubai prices

"10%-12%."

He reached for his ringing mobile phone and switched to Arabic.

"I'm with some people now, but I can make it at 1300," he said, fixing up his next meeting.

Then, he picked up where we left off, "I'm told our prices are reaching those in Dubai."

"But they don't get bombed in Dubai."

"I know," he said amid peels of laughter.

"But Iraq, it's a beautiful place. Many people want to be here."

Just over a year ago, President George W Bush confounded his Iraq war critics by sending more troops to the country, instead of withdrawing them as much of America was demanding.The plan is called the "surge" and in the past few months, its impact is being felt.

US and newly-trained Iraqi troops go into neighbourhoods, drive out insurgents, stay there, win round the local people and begin development programmes.It is not all working. Bombers slip through.There are daily killings. This is a country still very much at war. But amid it, many Iraqis have a new spring in their step.

Buoyant prices

Buoyant property prices might be one result, just as the jumping, bustling shopping streets in central Baghdad are another - often so packed that you have to jostle your way through, past clothes stalls, shops of electronic gadgets and trolleys brimming with bright, fresh fruit.

Some of those oranges, bananas, apricots and apples find their way into the window display of the MeshMesha fruit juice and pastry bar run by Ahmed Sabah and his extended family.

Young nephews and cousins, dressed in smart, orange, sports shirts with the MeshMesha logo - which actually means Apricot - blend delicious drinks of fresh fruit for a steady stream of customers - Sunni, Shia, Kurds, Christians. No-one seems to care as they sit at minimalist tables watching the world go by.

"When it's safe outside, of course business is better," said Ahmed.

"I have four branches - one we've had to close because it was in a violent neighbourhood, but once the war is over we can spread the chain throughout Iraq."

The MeshMesha chain supports five families that between them are raising 25 children still at school and it employs a couple of dozen of its youngsters in the fruit juice bars.

Return of the ATM?

Without work and a sense of the future, many young men head off to join a militia.

"Your money," I asked. "Do you keep it in cash, put it in the bank? How does that work?"

"In a bank," said Ahmed. "And we exchange some into US dollars."

One of Iraq's biggest private banks has a luxuriously designed office above the Baghdad Stock Exchange and I asked a senior executive how business was now compared to those glory days of the 1980s that Naimah, the estate agent, had spoken about.

"People didn't trust the banks, then," said the financier Mohammed Issa.

His accent was East Coast American and he wore a brown suit with a brightly coloured open-necked shirt. He would have a panoramic view across Baghdad except the window was blocked by glass cabinets with ornamental displays - again to shield against a bomb attack.

"We had, maybe 4,000 clients under Saddam. Now we have 50,000," he explained.

"We've just set up Internet banking so our customers don't have to risk getting bombed by going to a branch.". He paused for a moment. "Yes, once the war's over, we'll have our ATM machines throughout the country."

Check-point fear

In the afternoon we were driving back to the office past what we thought was a routine check-point. A van had been stopped. Men in military uniforms waved guns holding open the vehicle's sliding door. People were shouting. The expression of those in the van were of anger, anxiety and fear.

"What's happening there?" I asked our interpreter.

"I don't know." He shrugged. "It looks like the army, but I think it's a militia."

"What might happen to them."

"I don't know," he said sombrely.

There are glimpses of hope in Iraq, but at the moment only glimpses.

The Political Illusion of Change

Another season of change, another chapter in illusion. Such is the 2008 political campaign. It is hard to fault the yearning for change, but all the promise of change will quickly be forgotten before the next President is sworn in. It will be apparent by simply looking at the political appointees. All the endorsements and donations and tactical maneuvers will eventually be exposed for what they are; an investment in politics as usual in Washington DC. Just another toss of the loaded dice.

The false promise of "change"
By DAN K. THOMASSON seattlepi.com
GUEST COLUMNIST

WASHINGTON -- With all this talk about change from the presidential aspirants, one should remember that in politics, as in few other endeavors, the more things change the more they stay the same. Reinforcing the truth of this cliche, of course, is the fact that the c-word has been the universal theme of candidates for public office almost since the invention of elections.

There is another truism that makes the promise of new approaches from the Oval Office most difficult to sustain. Washington is not only slow to change but is nearly immune from radical alteration. It is an institution unto itself where decisions are made at bureaucratic levels far below that of the Oval Office, no matter what policies a president may set. To effect real change, one must think in practical terms and spend years trying to get there. Medicare is an example, winning passage in 1965 after decades of bartering.

In America, revolutionary thinking can be defined as the simple altering of a few lines in the Internal Revenue Service code or proposing the raising or lowering of Social Security benefits. Promoting anything much more extreme than that probably ends up meaning that most candidates are wasting money campaigning. Rep. Ron Paul's libertarian ideas, which have raised a lot of money on the Internet for a presidential effort that has never gotten above moribund, is a case in point. Taking the country back to a kinder, gentler time might have its appeal to those who have more dollars than sense, but when it comes to casting a vote reality sets in rather rapidly. Besides, they didn't have the Internet in the kinder times.

When Franklin Roosevelt's ideas during the darkest economic and social period in the history of the Republic got too radical, Supreme Court justices reined him in by ruling they were contrary to the Constitution. He then tried unsuccessfully to increase the size of the court -- so much for change. Don't misunderstand. The illusion of change can be very powerful. For millions of young Americans, John F. Kennedy held out the promise of a more vibrant America. So he gave them Vietnam and made little headway in reforming race relations or in solving any other major domestic problem.

What the current crop of candidates seems to be promising is difficult to define. They talk in terms of universal health care and revolutionizing public education and of making the tax code fairer by forcing the rich to pay more, and they hold out the promise of ending America's adventures overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan. But how is that much different from what candidates traditionally endorse? It isn't, of course. And when one looks at the front-runners for the nomination in both parties, it is difficult to find the kind of practical leadership experience that might give us some hope they could fulfill their promises.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama and John Edwards are woefully short of on-the-job training that would make a decent resume for a top managerial spot in most companies. Obama walked into the U.S. Senate and announced almost immediately that he would now like to run the country based on two qualifications: He is young and half-black. Edwards won his first public office as one of North Carolina's two senators and almost immediately began seeking higher office. For six years, including a vice-presidential nomination, he has never slowed his stumping, demanding and promising change. Only Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton can make a legitimate claim of experience, and her opponents who disparaged her as too influential as first lady now charge her role was minor.

Republicans aren't in much better shape. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who changed his profession from seeking converts to Christ to searching for voters of any stripe, wants change. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says he is for change. As proof he has altered his own moderate stances on controversial social issues like abortion. Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani hasn't changed. He is still talking about his experience during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on his city. The person with the most experience in the change department is Sen. John McCain, who seems finally to be returning to game form.

So when it comes to the c-word, it might be wise not to accept the concept too easily. In fact, it might be better to go for the candidate who talks less about it in the abstract and more about the realities accomplishing it. That'll be the day.

Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence.'

I guess we can dream

Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit
By Robert Bryce Washington Post
Sunday, January 13, 2008; B03

With oil prices still flirting with $100 a barrel, everyone is talking about the need for "energy independence." Late last year, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007; Sen. John McCain has declared, "We need energy independence"; and Sen. Barack Obama has called for "serious leadership to get us started down the path of energy independence."

This may all be good politics. But the idea that the United States, the world's single largest energy consumer, can be independent of the $5 trillion-per-year energy business -- the world's single biggest industry -- is ludicrous on its face. The push for energy independence is based on a series of false premises . Here are a few of the most pernicious ones.


1 Energy independence will reduce or eliminate terrorism.

In a speech last year, former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr. had some advice for American motorists: "The next time you pull into a gas station to fill your car with gas, bend down a little and take a glance in the side-door mirror. . . . What you will see is a contributor to terrorism against the United States." Woolsey is known as a conservative, but plenty of liberals have also eagerly adopted the mantra that America's foreign oil purchases are funding terrorism.

But the hype doesn't match reality. Remember, the two largest suppliers of crude to the U.S. market are Canada and Mexico -- neither exactly known as a belligerent terrorist haven.

Moreover, terrorism is an ancient tactic that predates the oil era. It does not depend on petrodollars. And even small amounts of money can underwrite spectacular plots; as the 9/11 Commission Report noted, "The 9/11 plotters eventually spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack." G.I. Wilson, a retired Marine Corps colonel who has fought in Iraq and written extensively on terrorism and asymmetric warfare, calls the conflation of oil and terrorism a "contrivance." Support for terrorism "doesn't come from oil," he says. "It comes from drugs, crime, human trafficking and the weapons trade."

2 A big push for alternative fuels will break our oil addiction.

The new energy bill requires that the country produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022. That sounds like a lot of fuel, but put it in perspective: The United States uses more than 320 billion gallons of oil per year, of which nearly 200 billion gallons are imported.

So biofuels alone cannot wean the United States off oil. Let's say the country converted all the soybeans grown by American farmers into biodiesel; that would provide only about 1.5 percent of total annual U.S. oil needs. And if the United States devoted its entire corn crop to producing ethanol, it would supply only about 6 percent of U.S. oil needs.

So what about cellulosic ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that can be produced from grass, wood and other plant sources? Many in Congress believe that it will ride to the rescue. But the commercial viability of cellulosic ethanol is a bit like the tooth fairy: Many believe in it, but no one ever actually sees it. After all, even with heavy federal subsidies, it took 13 years before the corn-ethanol sector was able to produce 1 billion gallons of fuel per year. Two and a half decades elapsed before annual corn-ethanol production reached 5 billion gallons, as it did in 2006. But now Congress is demanding that the cellulosic-ethanol business magically produce many times that volume of fuel in just 15 years. It's not going to happen.

3 Energy independence will let America choke off the flow of money to nasty countries.

Fans of energy independence argue that if the United States stops buying foreign energy, it will deny funds to petro-states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Hugo Ch¿vez's Venezuela. But the world marketplace doesn't work like that. Oil is a global commodity. Its price is set globally, not locally. Oil buyers are always seeking the lowest-cost supplier. So any Saudi crude being loaded at the Red Sea port of Yanbu that doesn't get purchased by a refinery in Corpus Christi or Houston will instead wind up in Singapore or Shanghai.

4 Energy independence will mean reform in the Muslim world.

The most vocal proponent of this one is New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who argues that the United States should build "a wall of energy independence" around itself and thereby lower global oil prices: "Shrink the oil revenue and they will have to open up their economies and their schools and liberate their women so that their people can compete. It is that simple." When the petro-states are effectively bankrupt, Friedman argues, we'll see "political and economic reform from Algeria to Iran."

If only it were that easy. Between about 1986 and 2000, oil prices generally stayed below $20 per barrel; by the end of 1998, they were as low as $11 per barrel. As Alan Reynolds pointed out in May 2005 in the conservative National Review Online, this prolonged period of "cheap oil did nothing to promote economic or political liberty in Algeria, Iran, or anywhere else. This theory has been tested -- and it failed completely."

5 Energy independence will mean a more secure U.S. energy supply.

To see why this is a myth, think back to 2005. After hurricanes ravaged the Gulf Coast, chewing up refineries as they went, several cities in the southeastern United States were hit with gasoline shortages. Thankfully, they were short-lived. The reason? Imported gasoline, from refineries in Venezuela, the Netherlands and elsewhere. Throughout the first nine months of 2005, the United States imported about 1 million barrels of gasoline per day. By mid-October 2005, just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, those imports soared to 1.5 million barrels per day.

So we're woven in with the rest of the world -- and going to stay that way. Today, in addition to gasoline imports, the United States is buying crude oil from Angola, jet fuel from South Korea, natural gas from Trinidad, coal from Colombia and uranium from Australia. Those imports show that the global energy market is just that: global. Anyone who argues that the United States will be more secure by going it alone on energy hasn't done the homework.

robert@robertbryce.com

Robert Bryce is a fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. He is the author of the forthcoming "Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of 'Energy Independence.' "

George Soros, Democrat, and Baby He Ain't Alone.

While the Cardinals of the Republican Party are trashing fellow Republicans, the Democratic machine is preparing to imbed itself in a way that will make a mockery of the Hugh Hewitt model of a permanent Republican majority. From lax voting rules, Supreme Court judges, and some very scary big money liberals, the Democrats are going to pummel the remains of the Reagan legacy. For a hint of the future, take a peek at the past.

January 13, 2008
Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study
Brendan Montague Financial Times

A STUDY that claimed 650,000 people were killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq was partly funded by the antiwar billionaire George Soros.

Soros, 77, provided almost half the £50,000 cost of the research, which appeared in The Lancet, the medical journal. Its claim was 10 times higher than consensus estimates of the number of war dead.

The study, published in 2006, was hailed by antiwar campaigners as evidence of the scale of the disaster caused by the invasion, but Downing Street and President George Bush challenged its methodology.

New research published by The New England Journal of Medicine estimates that 151,000 people - less than a quarter of The Lancet estimate - have died since the invasion in 2003.

“The authors should have disclosed the [Soros] donation and for many people that would have been a disqualifying factor in terms of publishing the research,” said Michael Spagat, economics professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The Lancet study was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and led by Les Roberts, an associate professor and epidemiologist at Columbia University. He reportedly opposed the war from the outset.

His team surveyed 1,849 homes at 47 sites across Iraq, asking people about births, deaths and migration in their households.

Professor John Tirman of MIT said this weekend that $46,000 (£23,000) of the approximate £50,000 cost of the study had come from Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Roberts said this weekend: “In retrospect, it was probably unwise to have taken money that could have looked like it would result in a political slant. I am adamant this could not have affected the outcome of the research.”

The Lancet did not break any rules by failing to disclose Soros’s sponsorship.

On The Road in Arabia

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates - President Neumann said Sunday that Iran is threatening the security of the world, and that the United States and Arab allies must join together to confront the danger "before it's too late."

Sometimes Killing Gets to be a Habit

We have all heard the expression, "battle hardened." It means something. It is not a natural thing to kill another human being. It takes training to make it happen and practice to make the happening easier. Sometimes it is hard to make it stop.


Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles


By DEBORAH SONTAG and LIZETTE ALVAREZ New York Times
Published: January 13, 2008

Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper soon reported: “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.”

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

More here

Mike Huckabee, Evangelicals and the South

Mike Huckabee is not a conservative and that won't wash in the South

The conventional wisdom is that Mike Huckabee will carry the Evangelical vote in the south. The only problem is that there is no "Evangelical vote." Most people can't even define the word "Evangelical". Evangelical has become a convenient term used by the media but there is no monolithic group of Evangelicals. There are stark contrasts ideologically, theologically and politically between Christian conservatives and their liberal brethren such as Jimmy Carter.

Do not confuse southern Christians with the more liberal "Evangelical" denominations in other parts of the country. New Anglican churches are springing up everywhere as southern Episcopalians split with New England Episcopalians. Midwestern Lutherans and Protestants are far more liberal than their southern counterparts. Even within the liberal churches there is an on-going struggle over issues such as boycotting Israel.

While polls show Huckabee leading in South Carolina and Georgia, the campaign has hardly begun and people are just now becoming aware of Huckabee's record. In the South Carolina debate this week, Fred Thompson pointed out that Mr. Huckabee is not a conservative. South Carolina Christians heard and loved Thompson's call to the Reagan ideals. Christians across the south will respond the same way and the polls will change. I am not making predictions but I wouldn't be surprised if Huckabee fails to win a single southern state.

The Pressure Cooker

How would you like to be the leader of Pakistan?

In a remote, backward, feudal part of the world struggling with modernity, Pervez Musharraf lives in a pressure cooker. He is in a bind; a vice as he as he performs a balancing act between opposing forces which have been unleashed and strengthened by the current rise of Islamic extremism and the fall of the Soviet Union.

If he is still around in February 2009 he's going to feel even more pressure from the United States to do something about the extremists in the FATA areas of Northwest Pakistan.

Report:
Pakistan warns US of entering border regions to fight al-Qaida

The Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

President Pervez Musharraf warned that U.S. troops would be regarded as invaders if they crossed into Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan in the hunt for al-Qaida or Taliban militants, according to an interview published Friday.

Musharraf, whose popularity has plummeted amid a surge in extremist attacks in recent months, also told Singapore's The Straits Times that he would resign if opposition parties tried to impeach him following next month's parliamentary elections.

Pakistan is under growing U.S. pressure to crack down on militants in its tribal regions close to the Afghan border.

The rugged area has long been considered a likely hiding place for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his top deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, as well as an operating ground for Taliban militants planning attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The New York Times reported last week that Washington was considering expanding the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to peruse aggressive covert operations within the tribal regions.

Musharraf told the Straits Times that U.S. troops would "certainly" be considered invaders if they set foot in the tribal regions.

"If they come without our permission, that's against the sovereignty of Pakistan. I challenge anybody coming into our mountains," he said in the interview in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. "They would regret that day."

Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup eight years ago, is also under growing domestic pressure.

The party of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and the other main opposition grouping are predicted to make gains in the Feb. 18 polls. They have vowed to oust Musharraf if they emerge as winners. Musharraf is seen as vulnerable to impeachment over his decision to fire Supreme Court judges and suspend the constitution last year.

"If that (impeachment) happens, let me assure that I'd be leaving office before they would do anything. If they won with this kind of majority and they formed a government that had the intention of doing this, I wouldn't like to stick around," he said. "I would like to quit the scene."

******Desert Rat also noted this article in one of Friday's threads. ******

Musharraf knows his real problem is not with the US violating his sovereignty. His problems are with the opposition politicians, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their sympathisers in the military, and the lawyers in his country. Another problem for Musharraf are those in the west, especially the media who insist that he resign. He is being squeezed from all sides and I don't envy the man. If occasionally he finds it necessary to make statements such as the one quoted in this article, we in the west shouldn't get our knickers twisted in knots.

It's not a good situation in Pakistan and from our viewpoint, progress in the WOT has been woefully inadequate as Musharraf seems to start and stop military actions in the Tribal areas but he is the ally we are stuck with for now. Stratfor has said that we can expect 2008 to be a stalemate year in Afghanistan. They say that we can expect a large increase in suicide bombers but neither NATO nor the Taliban have the wherewithal to advance their causes in southern Afghanistan. Musharraf is not the only one walking a tight rope.

Serbia Puts Down a Marker: No to US and UK.

Serbia bans US and British election monitors
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade Independent
Published: 12 January 2008

Serbia's electoral commission has barred US and British observers from monitoring its presidential elections in protest over the countries' support for Kosovan independence.

A member of the commission from the ultra-nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), Slavoljub Milenkovic, said yesterday that the US and Britain would be prevented from sending monitors for the 20 January elections "because their countries want to destroy us and grab Kosovo away from Serbia".

The US and most EU nations back independence for Kosovo, which is populated by some two million ethnic Albanians. It has been run by the UN since 1999, when a Nato bombing campaign forced Belgrade to end its crackdown on an armed insurgency of Kosovan Albanians.

After more than two years of internationally sponsored negotiations, Serbia, backed by Russia, still fiercely opposes the imminent independence of Kosovo and has refused any solution other than broad autonomy. Belgrade did not react yesterday to a report in The New York Times that claimed the US and Germany have agreed to recognise the independence of Kosovo, and will push the rest of the EU to follow suit after the outcome of the Serbian presidential elections, the second round of which is to be held on 3 February.

Senior EU officials told the paper that the US President, George W Bush, and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had agreed that it was imperative to secure the stability of the western Balkans by coordinating the recognition of Kosovo between the US and the EU.

Nationalism and anti-Western sentiment are growing in Serbia as it seeks to keep Kosovo from breaking away. The issue of Kosovan independence, which had been on the back-burner since 1999, came into sharp focus after international negotiations over the province began in 2005. Those efforts finally collapsed at the end of last year, prompting the Kosovan government-elect to warn that it would go ahead and declare independence in early 2008.

It provided a further opportunity for the conservative, nationalist government of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica to rally Serbs, most of whom consider Kosovo to be the cradle of their medieval state and religion. His harsh rhetoric on Kosovo has created an atmosphere resembling the nationalist era of former leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr Kostunica's frequent diatribes against the EU and its planned mission for Kosovo are pushing Serbia away from signing the Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU, which would give Serbia freer trade access to the European Union. Alongside this, Serbia's reluctance to hand over the remaining war crimes indictees is also not helping relations.

Mr Kostunica's insistence on closer ties with Russia also worries many. Serbs are deeply split over the issue, as no significant aid has ever been forthcoming from Russia in the recent past. No major Russian investments have been allowed since the fall of Milosevic in 2000.

However, Mr Kostunica's government now seems ready to sell the family jewellery, Oil Industry of Serbia (NIS), to Gazprom, Russia's state-run energy giant, in a murky deal for a knockdown price of €400m (£300m) by the end of next week, a move that anaylsts say could further endanger Serbia's access to the EU.

The European Commission yesterday voiced concern over the sale of NIS. Spokesman Krisztina Nagy said: "The Commission hopes that the sale of an important asset such as the Serbian oil company will be open and driven by objective, commercial and economic interests."

Serbia finds itself at a crossroads over the conflicting issues of Kosovo, the EU and relations with Russia just days before the presidential elections, which are considered crucial for the country. Voters are to chose between the reformist and pro-Western President Boris Tadic, and the ultranationalist SRS candidate Tomislav Nikolic. With their choice, they will also decide if Serbia will continue down the road of EU integration or return to its nationalist, isolationist past.

The Base is Hungry

The tired old man of the race, Fred Thompson showed some fire and spark last night in South Carolina. While everyone else intently tries to give the most intelligent answers to the questions posed, Thompson took a moment to describe the real essence of the current struggle in the Republican primary race:

HUME: Carl Cameron has the next round of questions.

Carl?

CAMERON: Thanks, Brit.

Good evening, Gentlemen.

As you all well know, no Republicans ever won the presidency without winning the first in the south, South Carolina, primary.

Governor Huckabee, a question for you.

Your adviser, Ed Rollins, recently said that the Reagan Coalition of Economic, Social and National Security Conservatives is gone and you've been quoted as saying that you're not running for another Reagan term.

Tell us, sir, what part of that coalition is gone and what has it been replaced by?

....THOMPSON: Can I answer that?

CAMERON: Senator Thompson, a 30-second rebuttal.

THOMPSON: Well, it's not a response. I mean, you asked a minute or a minute-and-a-half question of these gentlemen on the Reagan revolution. Could I address that?

CAMERON: Sure.

THOMPSON: It's an important issue, because I think it demonstrates what we're about here today. I think that Governor Huckabee's campaign manager said it accurately in terms of what they believe. They believe that it is over.

This is a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party and its future. On the one hand, you have the Reagan revolution. You have the Reagan coalition of limited government and strong national security.

On the other hand, you have the direction that Governor Huckabee would take us in. He would be a Christian leader, but he would also bring about liberal economic policies, liberal foreign policies.

THOMPSON: He believes we have an arrogant foreign policy and the tradition of, blame America first.

He believes that Guantanamo should be closed down and those enemy combatants brought here to the United States to find their way into the court system eventually.

He believes in taxpayer-funded programs for illegals, as he did in Arkansas.

He has the endorsement of the National Education Association, and the NEA said it was because of his opposition to vouchers.

He said he would sign a bill that would ban smoking nationwide. So much for federalism. So much for states' rights. So much for individual rights.

That's not the model of the Reagan coalition, that's the model of the Democratic Party.

***************

The overarching question that Republicans must answer and the candidates must decide is whether they are Bush RNC Republicans or Reagan Republicans. The Republican party is at a cross-roads; They can continue on as they have for the past eight years as big-spending Democrats Lite or they can return to the core conservative, small government beliefs of the traditional Republican party. As soon as a candidate figures out that the base is hungry for one of them to champion Reagan ideals and a return to sanity, he will emerge as the leader.

Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach is Dead.

Sheriff: Missing Pregnant Marine Is Dead, Suspect at Large
By MIKE BAKER WRAL
Associated Press Writer

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — A pregnant 20-year-old Marine missing for nearly a month is dead, and investigators were a seeking fellow Marine she had accused of raping her, a sheriff said Friday.
Authorities had not recovered the body of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, who was about eight months pregnant, but they believed she was buried in a shallow grave in a residential area of coastal Onslow County, Sheriff Ed Brown said. The suspect - 21-year-old Cpl. Marine Cesar Armando Lauren - is not in custody, he said.
"They don't know where he is," Brown said. "He's gone."

Can the Return of Praire Grass Replace Gasoline?

GRASS GAS: Turning fields of switchgrass like this one in northeastern Nebraska into ethanol produces 540 percent more energy than the amount consumed growing the native perennial.

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does
Midwestern farms prove switchgrass could be the right crop for producing ethanol to replace gasoline

By David Biello Scientific American

COURTESY OF USDA-ARS
Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is partially funding the construction of six such cellulosic biorefineries, estimated to cost a total of $1.2 billion. The first to be built will be the Range Fuels Biorefinery in Soperton, Ga., which will process wood waste from the timber industry into biofuels and chemicals. The DOE is providing an initial $50 million to start construction.

"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."

In fact, Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles. Of course, this estimate also relies on using the leftover parts of the grass itself as fuel for the biorefinery. "The lignin in the plant cell walls can be burned," Vogel says.

The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.

But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. "To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization," he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. "Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber."

It Is Fiscal Stimulus Time

Time for your medicine

$50 billion, $75 billion, and now Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is calling for $100 billion in increased government spending or transfer payments, to stimulate the economy.

The economy is clearly slowing rapidly. The consumer seems fatigued and cautious, business will soon follow the consumer, but the government can still print money and it will. The economy is so large that it will take $75 billion in extra government spending over a period of one to two quarters to increase the economy by just 1%. Therein lies the problem.

First it is an election year. Any thoughtful deliberation will therefore be unthinkable. The Democrats will demand more money for unemployment compensation, more food stamps, and more spending or give-aways to those that will be the most likely to spend it. Given the recent congressional habit of using earmarks, any stimulus bill will be larded with superfluous spending as everyone in Congress is up for re-election and a third of the Senate is as well.

Secondly, the Republicans will be no better. The only difference will be the constituency for the giveaways. It would be far wiser to pursue public works, infrastructure and domestic energy projects that would create additional domestic jobs and have a lasting positive economic effect. (A border fence could suck up a few billion.) However this would take thought and planning and would not be half as much fun. So it will be business as usual with politicians casting caution aside and we will make another run at government trying to spend us into prosperity, and no one will be able to stop it.

The Racial Buffoonery of Chris Matthews

Chris Mouthews  is dazzled by his self-perceived brilliance and breathless yammer. He stretches prepared metaphors to a one size fits all drivel delivered in staccato breathless phrases, and just when you think he cannot get any more irritating, he guffaws a "Heh" that convinces you he forgot to take his medication for Tourette's Syndrome.

Mathews is mediocre on a good day and transparent on all others. His latest outrage was to immediately start divining the racial bias of everyone that did not follow his fawning idolatry over Barack Obama. This clueless twit, along with some of his brighter betters at NBC have all been a twitter over the Bradley-effect, where white people allegedly lie about their intentions to vote for a black candidate.

We will hear more about the trouble this fool will cause further down the line as Mathews and his clack spread their racial poison.

Philip Agee, ex CIA, Permanent SOB, Dies in Cuba. Here's Hoping It Was Painful.

Bye Phil

CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba
By Anthony Boadle
Wed Jan 9, 3:40 PM ET

HAVANA (Reuters) - Philip Agee, a former CIA agent who exposed its undercover operations in Latin America in a 1975 book, died in Havana, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma said on Wednesday.

Agee, 72, died on Monday night, the newspaper said, calling him a "loyal friend of Cuba and staunch defender of the peoples' struggle for a better world."

His widow, German ballet dancer Giselle Roberge, told friends he had been in hospital since December 15 and did not survive surgery for perforated ulcers.

Agee worked for the CIA for 12 years in Washington, Ecuador, Uruguay and Mexico. He resigned in 1968 in disagreement with U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America and became one of the first to blow the whistle on the CIA's activities around the world.

His expose "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" revealed the names of dozens of agents working undercover in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. It was published in 27 languages.

The CIA declined to comment on his death.

Florida-born Agee said working as a case officer in South America opened his eyes to the CIA's Cold War goal in the region: to prop up traditional elites against perceived leftist threats through political repression and torture.

"It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America -- Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador -- they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the U.S. government," he told the British newspaper The Guardian in an interview published last year.

"That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries," he said.

U.S. CALLED HIM TRAITOR (because he was)

The U.S. government called Agee a traitor and said some of the agents he exposed were murdered, an allegation he rejected.

Agee went to live in London but was deported by Britain in 1976 at the request of then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The U.S. government revoked his passport three years later, saying he was a threat to national security.

Barbara Bush, the wife of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who was CIA director in 1976, blamed Agee in her memoirs for the murder of the Athens station chief, Richard Welsh, in 1975. Agee denied any connection and sued her for $4 million, forcing her to revise the book to settle the libel case.

In his autobiography "On the Run," Agee detailed how he was hounded from five NATO countries, including the Netherlands, France and West Germany, after incurring the CIA's wrath. He said the agency sought to discredit him with accusations that he was a drunkard and a womanizer.

In 1980 he went to live in Grenada where the leftist government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop granted him a passport and a haven until its fall in 1983.

Agee sought refuge in Fidel Castro's Cuba and lived between Havana and Hamburg after gaining German citizenship through marriage in 1990.

In 2000, Agee set up an online travel agency in Cuba catering to Americans willing to defy a U.S. travel ban and visit the Communist-run island. The business folded due to tighter enforcement of sanctions by President George W. Bush.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle; editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Will the Nevada Culinary Workers Have to Prove They Are Citizens?

Key Nevada union backs Obama in blow to Clinton

By Adam Tanner

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) - Barack Obama rebounded from a close loss to Hillary Clinton and won the support of the heavily Hispanic union representing Las Vegas casino workers on Wednesday ahead of the next Democratic presidential contest.

The Obama endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union, whose 60,000 members service the famed hotels and casinos on the Las Vegas strip and is a major political force in Nevada, was a blow to Clinton, who had campaigned for its backing in the state's January 19 contest.

"We had a wonderful dilemma," D. Taylor, the union's secretary treasurer, told a noisy news conference. "It's been a very difficult decision."

"We understand we are going against the Democratic power establishment ... we are used to being underdogs," he added.

Clinton, the New York senator aiming to become the first woman president in the November election, had led in polls in Nevada and courted the union and Hispanics, which make up 45 percent of the union's membership.

The group's parent organization, UNITE HERE, with 460,000 food service, gaming and other workers nationwide, also expressed support for Obama, the Illinois senator who is hoping to become America's first black president.

Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, USMC

A necessary component of our defense.

Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach is a personnel clerk assigned to Combat Logistics Regiment 27, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, II Marine Expeditionary Force, the Marine Corps said. She joined the service on June 6, 2006. I assume she spent 4 months in some form of basic training. That takes us into October 2006. On December 2007, the marine is missing and eight months pregnant. So the US taxpayer after spending who knows how much to recruit and train this marine finds her in a family way without a family within seven months of her leaving basic training. I do not know what kind of peril this young woman is in but what was she doing in the Marines in the first place? Please explain to me how having young pregnant unwed woman in the marines is in the national security interest of the US taxpaying public.

Pregnant Marine missing from North Carolina base

(CNN) --

A search is under way for a pregnant 20-year-old Marine who has been missing from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, since December 14.

Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach was eight months pregnant when she went missing on December 14.

Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach could give birth at any time, Onslow County Sheriff Ed Brown told the Jacksonville, North Carolina, Daily News on Monday.

The sheriff's department said Lauterbach's mother said that her daughter, of Montgomery, Ohio, had witnessed an incident at Camp Lejeune and was to testify about it.

Sheriff's department officials said evidence causes them to be concerned about Lauterbach's disappearance, WITN reported.

The Marine's car was found Monday at Jacksonville's bus station, Brown told the Daily News, and her cell phone had been found at Camp Lejeune's front gate on December 20.

Her mother reported her missing on December 19, and told the sheriff's department "that she was very suspicious that something bad may have happened to her daughter," the department said in a news release.

Investigators told the Marine Corps Times that a withdrawal from Lauterbach's bank account was made on December 14 and said there was "suspicious activity" on the account 10 days later. December 14 was also the last time Lauterbach's cell phone was used, authorities told the Marine Corps Times.

The Raleigh News and Observer, citing Brown, reported that the woman's mother said her daughter phoned home or her relatives up to 12 times a week and the mother became concerned when she did not hear from her daughter for five days.

A Facebook page established to help find Lauterbach says she was last seen December 14 in Jacksonville. "Call mom!!! You know the number," the page says. "All of us love you and we miss you. Please come home!"

The page contains pleas for contacts from fellow Marines and friends of Lauterbach in Ohio.

.

Then Why Are They Growing Heroin Poppies?

Is this a source of future trouble?

South Asia hit by food shortagesBBC

People across South Asia are struggling to cope with a severe shortage of affordable wheat and rice.
There have been queues outside Pakistani shops in towns around the country, and flour prices have shot up.

Wheat flour is a staple foodstuff in Pakistan, where rotis or unleavened bread are eaten with almost every meal.

Last week Afghanistan appealed for foreign help to combat a wheat shortage while Bangladesh recently warned it faced a crisis over rice supplies.

Global wheat prices are at record highs. Problems have been compounded by crop failures in the northern hemisphere and an increase in demand from developing countries.

Afghan Commerce Minister Mohammad Amin Farhang said wheat shortages could lead to serious problems during the winter.

His call came amid rising discontent inside Afghanistan at the spiralling cost of wheat and other basic foods.

The price of rice in many parts of South Asia is rising fast
Afghanistan does not grow enough wheat to feed all its people and is partially dependent on imports.

On Thursday, the chief of the Bangladesh army, Gen Moeen U Ahmed, said that he was "very concerned" about the problem of rice supplies which he said must be redressed immediately.

Many people in the country have been hit hard by spiralling food prices, which in some cases have doubled over the last year, mostly because of damage caused by heavy monsoon rain.

A delegation from Bangladesh is now in India to discuss importing rice to offset the shortages.

Increase in demand

Pakistan's government says it has no lack of wheat supplies and blames distribution problems and hoarders, as well as smuggling by suppliers.

Officials say the price is fixed in consultation with representatives of flour mill owners.

The BBC 's M Ilyas Khan in Karachi says that the Pakistani government buys wheat in bulk at the time of harvesting, and then releases stocks to flour mills according to a pre-determined quota.

It now says it has increased the quota allocated to the mills, warning them of penalties if they are found selling flour at prices higher than fixed by the government.

Pakistanis consume an estimated 22m tonnes of wheat annually, and last season's yield was more than 23m tonnes.

Officials accuse suppliers in Punjab, the breadbasket of Pakistan, of smuggling wheat intended for domestic use to Afghanistan and Central Asia to take advantage of price differences.

Flour ran short in Pakistan when many areas saw rioting after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in late December.

With the security situation in Pakistan now calmer, correspondents say it is not clear why apparent problems in distributing flour are persisting.

One reason cited is frequent power cuts which have led to flour mills stopping work.

"It's not fair," one retired worker, Younis, told Reuters news agency. "We are very angry."

He said he had waited for hours outside a government store in the southern city of Karachi, hoping to buy flour - but to no avail. Dozens of others went empty-handed, Reuters reported.

Initially, flour shortages pushed up the price on the open market in Pakistan to as much as 60 rupees (about $1) per kilogram in some areas. The average day labourer earns only 100 rupees a day.

The state-run Utility Stores Corporation has been selling flour at 18 rupees per kilogram, but it does not have enough outlets to serve the population of 160 million.

The Black Sheep and the Republican Cardinals

Looking for guidance

If there is a national conservative pundit that supports John McCain, someone will have to help me out. I do not know who it is. Romney seems wobbly at best and Rudy is a puzzlement. Is it possible that it will be Huckabee or McCain? It certainly appears that it could be McCain. Based on Hillary's victory speech in New Hampshire, she is going left and populist. The Democrats are going to fracture with the blacks feeling like their moment was taken from them. The Republicans will be faced with a breakup or a makeup. Steady as you go, interesting times ahead.

Bush Administration Going Bear Hunting

Bush convenes Plunge Protection Team
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:05am GMT 08/01/2008

Bears beware. The New Deal of 2008 is in the works. The US Treasury is about to shower households with rebate cheques to head off a full-blown slump, and save the Bush presidency. On Friday, Mr Bush convened the so-called Plunge Protection Team for its first known meeting in the Oval Office. The black arts unit - officially the President's Working Group on Financial Markets - was created after the 1987 crash.

It appears to have powers to support the markets in a crisis with a host of instruments, mostly by through buying futures contracts on the stock indexes (DOW, S&P 500, NASDAQ and Russell) and key credit levers. And it has the means to fry "short" traders in the hottest of oils.

The team is led by Treasury chief Hank Paulson, ex-Goldman Sachs, a man with a nose for market psychology, and includes Fed chairman Ben Bernanke and the key exchange regulators.

Judging by a well-briefed report in the Washington Post, a mood of deep alarm has taken hold in the upper echelons of the administration. "What everyone's looking at is what is the fastest way to get money out there," said a Bush aide.

Emergency measures are now clearly on the agenda, apparently consisting of a mix of tax cuts for businesses and bungs for consumers. Fiscal action all too appropriate, regrettably.

We face a version of Keynes's "extreme liquidity preference" in the 1930s - banks are hoarding money, and the main credit arteries of the financial system remain blocked after five months.

"In terms of any stimulus package, we're considering all options," said Mr Bush. This should be interesting to watch. The president is not one for half measures. He has already shown in Iraq and on biofuels that he will pursue policies a l'outrance once he gets the bit between his teeth.

The only question is what the president can manage to push through a Democrat Congress.

The Plunge Protection Team - long kept secret - was last mobilised to calm the markets after 9/11. It then went into hibernation during the long boom.

Mr Paulson reactivated it last year, asking the staff to examine "systemic risk posed by hedge funds and derivatives, and the government's ability to respond to a financial crisis", he said.

It seems he failed to spot the immediate threat from mortgage securities and the implosion of the commercial paper market. But never mind.

The White House certainly has grounds for alarm. The global picture is darkening by the day. The Baltic Dry Index has been falling hard for seven weeks, signalling a downturn in bulk shipments. Singapore's economy contracted 3.2pc in the final quarter of last year, led by a slump in electronics and semiconductors.

The Tokyo bourse kicked off with the worst New Year slide in more than half a century as the Seven Samurai exporters buckled. The Topix is down 24pc from its peak. If Japan and Singapore are stalling, it is a fair bet that China's efforts to tighten credit are starting to bite. Asia is not going to rescue us. On the contrary.

Keep an eye on Japan, still the world's top creditor by far, with $3 trillion in net foreign assets. The Bank of Japan has been the biggest single source of liquidity for the global asset boom over the last five years. An army of investors - Japanese insurers and pension funds, housewives and hedge funds borrowing at near zero rates in Tokyo - have sprayed money across the Antipodes, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, Iceland, Latvia, the US commercial paper market and the City of London.

The Japanese are now bringing the money home, as they always do when the cycle turns. The yen has risen 13pc against the dollar and 12pc against sterling since the summer. We are witnessing the long-feared unwind of the "carry trade", valued by BNP Paribas in all its forms at $1.4 trillion.

The US data is now relentlessly grim. Unemployment jumped from 4.7pc to 5pc - or 7.7m - in December, the biggest one-month rise since the dotcom bust and clear evidence that the housing crunch has spread to the real economy.

"At this point the debate is not about a soft land or hard landing; it is about how hard the hard landing will be," said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University.

"Financial losses and defaults are spreading from sub-prime to near-prime and prime mortgages, to commercial real estate loans, to auto loans, credit cards and student loans, and sharply rising default rates on corporate bonds. A severe systemic financial crisis cannot be ruled out. This will be a much worse recession than the mild ones in 1990-91 and 2001," he said.

Sovereign wealth funds stand ready to rescue banks, as they have already rescued Citigroup and UBS. But as Moody's pointed out this week, the estimated $2,500bn in lost wealth from the US house price crash is more than the entire net worth of all the sovereign wealth funds in the world.

Add fresh losses as the property bubbles pop in Britain, Ireland, Australia, Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, as they surely must unless central banks opt for inflation (which would annihilate bonds instead, with equal damage), and you can discount $1,500bn in further attrition.

Not even a Bush New Deal can hold back the post-bubble tide that is drawing in across the globe. What it can do is buy time. Fortunately for America - and the world - the US budget deficit is a healthy 1.2pc of GDP ($163bn). Washington has the wherewithal to fund a fiscal blitz.

Britain has no such luxury. Our deficit is 3pc of GDP at the top of the cycle. Gordon Brown has shut the Keynesian door.

A Polar Shift?

The new face of the Democratic party is revealing itself and Barack Obama is the "Change Agent."

Barack is a very interesting figure. He is articulate, intelligent, young and photogenic. A man with little political baggage and a history of bipartisan legislative work. He is a fresh face that brings an optimistic, hopeful message. In many ways, he in the antithesis of Hillary Clinton even as he emulates the original Man from Hope in a call for "Change." Just as George W. Bush did in 1999, he has positioned himself as a "uniter, not a divider." A politician who can reach across the isle.

His campaign rhetoric has a seductive appeal to the moderate middle of the political spectrum. He calls for "unity" but his platform, his policies, are not moderate. They are straight out of the Democratic Party platform and therein lies the rub. Barack represents himself as a "change agent" but the real change he represents is in the power shift within the Democratic party. Away from the Clintons and towards the back rooms of the Chicago machine. Not that he is a product of that machine. It's been reported that he rose to prominence and office outside the machine but it's a safe bet that he has since been embraced by the Chicago king makers and this election could annoint Barack's succession to that throne.

Just as Bill Clinton was groomed by his mentor William Fullbright, Barack has been groomed. His path to politics is a familiar one for young black men and involves working with PIRG where up and coming young activists work hard, and learn the issues and the systems.

Barack Obama is Democratic insurance against the "unelectability of Hillary Clinton." He is the alternative candidate who has so far succeeded beyond any Democrat's wildest dreams. Barack is dismantling the Clinton machine and causing a polar shift in the Democratic party. As Barack reminds us, "Change is coming."

We would do well to find out where that new center of gravity is and where that change is coming from.

Did the Inarticulator Do In Hillary?

Everything in life is context. Singular events happen and they do so as a result of the times or in a manner that changes them. JFK followed a tired and gray Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was a great war time general and an adequate and competent President. He was not a good speaker. A young, handsome and witty, glib and polished, New Englander made a sharp contrast to old Ike. JFK glittered against the dull grayness of Eisenhower.

In an odd twist, Hillary is bedeviled by the stumbling prose of GWB. Had Bush been a fine speaker and governed the same, Obama's coinage would not appear to be so bright.

Could fate be so cruel that Hillary's context in time tripped her presidential ambitions on the twisted syntax and garble of George W. Bush? Cruelty and irony often shine in politics and Obama may very well bling his way to the Oval Office and that would be unfortunate for Clinton, Obama and us.

I hope Hillary fights on and has the mettle to take on Obama, not because I want her to win, but because I want either Obama or Hillary to be the best candidate to face the best Republican. That is our system like it or not.

A Candidacy's Prose and Cons

By E. J. Dionne Jr. Washington Post
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; Page A19

CONCORD, N.H. -- Hillary Clinton may have unintentionally written the obituary for the Iowa and New Hampshire phase of her presidential campaign, and perhaps her candidacy, when she told voters on Sunday: "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."

Clinton has not heeded her own lesson. She is campaigning in prose and has left the poetry to Barack Obama. She has answers to hard policy questions, but he has the one answer that voters are hungering for: He offers himself as the vehicle for creating a new political movement that will break the country out of a sour, reactionary political era.

The most telling laugh line in Obama's stump speech is his description of the dreadful charge his opponents make against him. "Obama's talking about hope again," the candidate says, mimicking his foes. Then his tenor drops to a low, conspiratorial pitch: "He's a hope monger." His audiences roar.

There is a certain melancholy in watching Clinton do battle. Obviously aware that the bottom is falling out from under her, she choked up Monday during her last day of campaigning here. By way of proving her tenacity and the depth of her policy knowledge, she has subjected herself to unremitting rounds of questions from voters about every issue from health care to global warming.

Clinton knows her stuff and would pass the most rigorous test available under any "No Policy Left Behind" program for politicians. If we chose a president by examination rather than election, she would win. In Hampton on Sunday night, Maggie Wood Hassan, a prominent state senator, said of Clinton's savvy on health care: "There isn't a single piece of the puzzle she hasn't figured out." True, but voters right now are not thinking about intricate puzzles.

There is compassion in Clinton's wonkiness. At a rally in Penacook on Saturday, she spoke with energy about the struggles of foster parents and the suffering of foster children. She pledged to make their problems a priority of her presidency, even if there are no headlines in it. She sounded absolutely believable.

Yet if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

It is no accident that the two best preachers on the trail, Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee, broke through in Iowa -- even if Huckabee's prospects here and in the long run are dimmer than Obama's. And it has to be painful for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who saw themselves 16 years ago as the heirs to John and Robert Kennedy, to watch Obama march off as the champion of a vast band of young and practical idealists.

The Clinton campaign is rooted in the idea that "Experience Counts" -- ironically enough, Richard Nixon's slogan against John Kennedy in 1960. But it is Obama who may have precisely the right experience for the mood of the moment. As a community organizer early in his professional life, Obama understood his task as catalyzing citizens into building movements for change. Obama's speeches are about citizen action, assembling coalitions, forcing change through popular demand.

"I'm betting on you," Obama told a rapturous audience in Derry on Sunday afternoon. "I don't believe change comes from the top down. It comes from the bottom up." Change will come "if you believe," Obama declares.

"When you've got a working majority behind you," he says at another point, "you can't be stopped." Transformation is not about policy details but about altering the political and social calculus. Obama presents himself, in one of Karl Rove's favorite phrases, as a game-changer.

If Obama seems to have history's winds at his back, Clinton is carrying history's burdens. In trying to push her way back into the contest by Feb. 5, when nearly two dozen states vote, Clinton would have to press her sober case that, as good as Obama sounds, she's the one who is vetted and tested. "If you want to know which kind of change we will make," she pleaded to her Sunday night crowd, "look at what we've already done."

Here again, the echoes of the past are eerie. It was Hubert Humphrey, on the aging side of the generational divide in 1968, who declared: "Some people talk about change, others cause it." Hubert Humphrey was a great man. He did not become president.

Iran Almost Changed the US Election

UPDATE: While the navy ran off the gunboats, we had a glitch in the sky. Two F-18's had a less than perfect formation incident, I think they call it a LTPFI.

For an analysis of the day's work in the Gulf, we have:

desert rat said...

An F/A Super Hornet costs $39.5 million per aircraft.

Thankfully the pilots are safe. We only lost $79 million USD, this morning. 

If those aircraft were up in reaction to the Iranian "fast boat" cruise by, the Iranians have won the exchange.

Otherwise it's just an ongoing expense of securing Chinese & Japanese oil supplies.

__________________

US tells Iran to back down after Gulf skirmish

By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Telegraph
Last Updated: 10:02pm GMT 07/01/2008

The White House has told Iran that it risked provoking "a dangerous incident" after a weekend skirmish brought the two nations to the brink of conflict.

US naval commanders were about to fire on a group of Iranian attack boats after being challenged at the mouth of the Gulf on Sunday, the Pentagon has disclosed.

Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf
The Persian Gulf is the scene of tensions between Iran and the US

Three US navy ships were targeted by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy as they entered the strait just after dawn.

Five Iranian patrol boats came within 200 yards of the US vessels, issued threats over the radio and dropped mysterious objects into the water.

A transcript of the radio traffic revealed that the Iranians had warned the US commanders that an attack was underway: "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes."

A "swarm" attack by small Iranian boats in the busy shipping lane is one of the prime security threats to the US navy presence.
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Its commanders were handing down an order to open fire when Iran navy patrol boats pulled back from international waters.

A Pentagon spokesman said the Iranians were "moments" away from coming under fire.

A statement issued by the US Navy Fifth Fleet said that the incident occurred at about 8am local time as the cruiser Port Royal, the destroyer Hopper and the frigate Ingraham were on their way into the Gulf and passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tensions in the Strait, a narrow waterway responsible for 40 per cent of the global trade in oil shipments, have escalated as Washington and Teheran swap accusations over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The White House demanded that Iran refrain from further provocation but Teheran played down the incident as an "ordinary occurrence".

The Pentagon said the skirmishes constituted a "significant" act of aggression at the chokepoint of global oil supplies.

An official said: "Five small boats were acting in a very aggressive way, charging the ships, dropping boxes in the water in front of the ships and causing our ships to take evasive manoeuvres. There were no injuries but there very well could have been."

Iran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons has seen the US-led naval coalition, based at the home of the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, dramatically increase its presence in the Gulf.

The Iranian response has been a series of dangerous exercises that have forced the coalition on to high alert.

Operating procedures were overhauled last year after the Iranian navy seized 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines, who were protecting Iraqi oil facilities at the head in the Gulf.

The British patrol was accused of trespassing in Iranian territory and surrendered without a shot, in part because air cover was withdrawn before the Iranians pounced.

The 15 crew of the frigate Cornwall were taken to Teheran where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presided over a humiliating ceremony announcing their release as an Easter "gift" to the British people.

Steps taken to ensure the superiority of allied naval firepower along the international boundaries of the congested shipping lanes include deployment of modern attack helicopters plus rapid reaction US coastguard boats and additional marine guards.

Task Force 152, the US-led naval coalition, officially acts in support of the oil-rich but militarily-weak states. With President George W Bush due to visit the region this week, Iran's threat to world oil supplies will loom large on the agenda.

'Change"- How Youthful Idealism and Vision Killed Britain

Change Artist, Tony Blair

Britain is a social mess, much of it created by the sixties generation that wanted to prove that they were unlike the racist and bigoted Americans of the fifties. Britain also had to prove amends for colonialism and they did so with a vengeance. Britain swung the doors open to one and all and embraced the idol of multiple cultures. It disparaged anyone who dared to question the youthful vision of the new changed Britain. Myth and belief trumped experience and skepticism. Change indeed causes change and with change comes unintended and often unforeseen consequences. The consequences of change often outlive the youthful idealisms of the visionaries and architects. Let the buyer beware.

Multiculturalism is breeding intolerance
By Philip Johnston, Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 07/01/2008

It has taken a long time to happen, but at last an authoritative and senior establishment figure has pointed to the elephant in the room. Before the Bishop of Rochester's article yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph, the debate about immigration focused almost exclusively on who benefits financially. We have tiptoed around its effect on our society and culture. Even the somewhat belated recognition by ministers that newcomers should show a commitment to British values and demonstrate a knowledge of English tends to be couched in economic terms and ones favourable to the immigrants themselves - that they will get a job more easily and their lives will be enhanced if they are more integrated.


'Few politicians have been willing to question the impact of a growing Muslim population'

However, few politicians have been willing to do what Michael Nazir-Ali has done, which is to question the impact of a growing Muslim population upon the very fabric of the nation, turning it within half a century into a multi-faith and multicultural land. It is hardly surprising, perhaps, for a Christian prelate to lament the powerful appeal of another faith challenging where his own once reigned supreme. Furthermore, the recent immigration of more than half a million eastern Europeans has delighted Roman Catholic leaders whose churches were full to bursting over Christmas.

But they share an historic and religious heritage. The issue that Bishop Nazir-Ali raised has more to do with our failure to integrate Muslims because our political elites were in thrall to what he called "the novel philosophy of multiculturalism". One consequence was the ease with which extremists exploited an emphasis on separatism to recruit among the more impressionable young men in their communities.

Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character in some cities by insisting on artificial amplification for the adhan, the call to prayer, and even to introduce some aspects of sharia to civil law. Sitting in the background, seemingly stalled for the time being, are plans to establish Europe's largest markaz - an Islamic prayer and meeting area able to accommodate at least 40,000 people - right beside the site for the 2012 London Olympics, where it would be a potent icon of how Britain has changed.

In truth, the bishop has simply articulated what many in the Government and in the race relations world have already come to realise (and which most of the rest of us understood years ago), and that is the baleful consequences of three decades of multiculturalism. Last year, even the Commission for Racial Equality, once a cheerleader for the concept, recanted with a report that depicted Britain as an unequal and segregated nation in danger of breaking up.


Like Bishop Nazir-Ali, it feared that extremism was being fostered by the retreat of different groups behind their ethnic walls. For many years, those who wanted Britain to be recognised as a multicultural society which needed to revise, or even jettison, five centuries of Protestant hegemony held centre stage. Anyone who questioned it had their reputations trashed. The multiculturalists even coined an insult - Islamophobia - to try to close down the debate. Some of them yesterday accused the bishop of "scaremongering".

But while multiculturalism began as a facet of Britain's characteristic toleration of other people's ways, religions, cuisines, languages and dress, it metamorphosed into a political creed that held that ethnic minority groups should be allowed to do what they like. It became a guiding principle of governance. When he became prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair urged the nation to embrace multiculturalism. Almost 10 years later, as he prepared to leave Downing Street, he was making speeches informing immigrants they had "a duty" to integrate with the mainstream of society. "Conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed," he said.

But the "hate-mongers" were already here; and if they weren't they found getting here easy enough. There was a ready-made audience for their anti-western rhetoric among some sections of the Muslim community who had become estranged from the rest of the country - not just from the white Christian majority but from everyone else. So estranged that some were, and still are, prepared to kill others and themselves. When Mohammed Siddique Khan, the leader of the July 7 suicide bombers, spoke in his "martyr video" of "the injustices perpetrated against my people" he did not mean the folk among whom he grew up in Yorkshire.

As Bishop Nazir-Ali recognises, the religious diversity that can - and should - be easily accommodated in a liberal, democratic and (still) overwhelmingly Christian country has taken on a more malign aspect which politicians are belatedly seeking to address. Ministers are even trying to enlist the help of Muslim women in countering the extremists by sending them on training courses to give them the skills and confidence to confront fanatics. This may be a laudable aim but simply is not going to happen in many Muslim communities.

Inevitably, Bishop Nazir-Ali's comments have proven controversial, not least his observation that some parts of the country are no-go areas for non-Muslims. But this segregation has been apparent for many years and was officially acknowledged as long ago as 2001 after riots in some northern towns. The inquiry into their cause was appalled to find British people living "parallel lives", with some young people from ethnic minorities able to go through life exclusively in the company of their own kind.

The diminution of this country's commitment to Anglicanism mourned by the bishop was taking place even without the arrival of another proselytising faith as potent as Islam. However, there is a wider issue that affects everyone: it has to do with the sort of country in which we all want to live. Religious intolerance breeds political intolerance; and we are seeing the great legacies of an enlightened Christian tradition - individual liberty and freedom under the law - squandered because of a need to face down extremists who deride such concepts and who should have been confronted a long time ago.

Cannibalism in Texas, Jana Shearer, Where Were Her Parents?

Jana's Interests
General Music,dance,my friends,haven fun!
Music Rap, R &; B, and a lot of other stuff
Movies All movies, I love movies!
Television MTV,BET,The simple life,Deal or No Deal,Starting Over,Amaricans Next Top Modle, all that good stuff!
Books IF you have read a good one let me know!
Heroes My family. Blood runs deep. The Good Lord above.
TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF - The Survey
Name: Jana
Birthday: March 26,2006
Birthplace: Austin TEXAS!!!!
Current Location: Tyler,Whitehouse
Eye Color: Green
Hair Color: Brown,blond,alittle of everything
Height: 5'10"
Right Handed or Left Handed: Left handed
Your Heritage: What?
The Shoes You Wore Today: Which ones?
Your Weakness: Too nice!
Your Fears: Fire, being alone
Myspace

McCuin's record includes driving while intoxicated and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges. McCuin was facing a felony retaliation warrant at the time of his arrest Saturday. Real dating material.

Bizarre Tyler Murder Included Possible Cannibalism
KXAN

A Tyler man accused in the grisly mutilation killing of his girlfriend appeared in court Monday on a capital murder charge.

No plea was immediately entered for Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, in a case where the victim's body parts were found in a kitchen.

Sheriff officials were alerted Saturday morning after McCuin told his mother and her boyfriend to look in their garage. There, the couple saw the body of 21-year-old Jana Shearer, McCuin's girlfriend. McCuin's mother and her boyfriend fled the home and flagged down a police officer.

After they left, McCuin called 911 and told an emergency dispatcher he had killed his girlfriend and was boiling parts of her, said Smith County Sheriff J.B. Smith.

When authorities arrived at the home, they found Shearer's mutilated body, one ear boiling in a pot of water on the stove and some human flesh sitting on a plate with a fork on the kitchen table.

"I'm never shocked anymore, but I am surprised that human beings can actually do this kind of stuff to each other," Smith told the Tyler Morning Telegraph in a story on its Web site today. "You ask yourself how anyone could do anything like this to someone else. I just don't have an answer."

Shearer appeared to die from blunt trauma to her head, Smith said. Sheriff deputies said they believe she was abducted by McCuin from her home Friday night.

"That's the last time anyone saw her, and we feel she was taken against her will because she was not wearing any shoes. She didn't have her purse or her cell phone," Smith said.

Smith said McCuin then drove to his estranged wife's home, where he stabbed William Veasley, 42. Veasley remains in intensive care at a Tyler hospital.

McCuin was still in that home when deputies arrived, but he jumped into his car and escaped after a short chase, Smith said.

McCuin wasn't seen again until Saturday morning, when he arrived at his mother's home and called her into the garage so she could "come see what he had done," Smith said.

When sheriff deputies arrived, McCuin barricaded himself in the home for a short time before coming out. After he emerged, a tactical team entered and found Shearer's body, Sgt. Gary Middleton said.

After McCuin was arrested and placed in the back of a patrol car, he kicked out the vehicle's side window before being put in additional restraints, Middleton said.

Detectives were trying to determine where the murder happened. They think McCuin drove to his mother's home with the dead woman in the back seat of his extended-cab pickup, said Sheriff's Lt. Larry Wiginton.

"He didn't just kill her and that was it," Wiginton said. "This murder went on for a while and it was pretty brutal and there was some evidence of some really weird stuff."

McCuin has a criminal record that includes driving while intoxicated and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges, according to court records. When he was arrested, McCuin had an outstanding felony retaliation warrant.

Neighbors said they believed McCuin was on drugs and had acted strangely.

"He would stand in the roadway and wouldn't let people pass and he would talk to himself. He acted crazy," said next door neighbor Pam Hightower.

McCuin remains in the Smith County Jail on $2 million bond.

The judge also sealed the arrest and search warrants, plus issued a gag order in the case.

The New Camelot or is it Shamelot?

How many times have I heard that the Barack family resembles the Kennedys? Barack delivers a hopeful message that as Trish has observed resonates with the young. He looks younger than his 45 years and he offers a break from the tiresome past of the Clintons. Obama is a charismatic politician with a fresh face and a smooth delivery but he is just another Democrat promising as much socialism as he can get away with.

A visit to his web pages reveals essentially nothing new. He wants to make another 10 million Americans exempt from Federal income taxes altogether. In addition, he wants to lower taxes on the middle class and raise taxes on the wealthy.

He wants everyone covered by a national insurance program, if you have insurance you can continue to pay for it otherwise you will be a insured by the National Pool which will be administered by the Federal Government. Essentially he envisions a Federal single payer program.

Obama is down with the unions and against corporate America. If you're young and hep like Obama, you know that "down with" does not mean "down on." It means the Unions are his peeps. He wants to review NAFTA and CAFTA for adverse impact on US labor. Of course, he's a union man and as such, he is all for whatever the Unions are all for and against whatever the Unions are against. He's has also proposed a system which automatically raises the minimum wage.

A good dem's got to be for the working man and against big business and Obama is nothing if not a good Dem. That means that under an Obama administration, big business can expect to make atonement for its past transgressions against the working man. Higher taxes are in order unless you happen to be in one of the favored green or high tech industries.

And to show that he is also a fiscal conservative, he advocates PayGo which means that every new dollar of spending will be paid for by a cut in the budget elsewhere or a tax increase. It makes perfect sense until you realise that the Federal budget is one big shell game.

Barack makes wonderful, hopeful speeches offering hope and unity to a polarized country. "Change" is the theme of his campaign and like the Pied Piper, young people are attracted and following him. I feel sorry for them in a way. They are still naive and are about to learn some important lessons about humanity and politics.

The Republican Wife Who Created 'President Obama'

Only a Republican Senator could have a wife like Jeri Ryan and want to watch her have sex with a stranger.

Obama does not smile. He blinks, and in a blink he has snatched the moment away from Hillary. Only a miracle will save Hillary. Obama knows it. The Clintons know it.

Obama has the instincts of a predator, is a gifted orator, and has superb political skills. He is also a recipient of having deliciously inept political enemies. Remember how he came to be senator?

An incumbent Republican Senator wanted to watch his beautiful wife have sex with strangers in sex clubs and got exposed. The same Republican gentry that discovered and packaged George W. Bush decided that the slimed senatorial candidate should be replaced by none other than Alan Keyes. Need I say more?

Obama took that free pass and moved right over from Baltic Avenue to Park Place.

The Republicans have convinced the Democrats that Hillary is unelectable. Instead of forming an argument that would convince the American people that the GOP deserved another chance, the Republican establishment obsessed over Hillary. All the big mouth media types were prepared for the Hillary kill and missed Obama studying the field, who is now deftly taking Hillary apart state by state.

Obama will now sprint to the nomination. The Republican Cardinals are stuck between a hate and a loath, McCain and Huckabee. Can McCain save the Republican Party? That will get you blinking.

A Question for the Candidates

A new tactic to foul the US training and integration program with Iraqi forces has been uncovered. The US initially reported the deaths of a Capt Rowdy Inman, 38, and a Sgt Benjamin Portell, 27, as resulting from hostile small arms fire.

But Iraqi general Mutaa al-Khazraji said the joint patrol was attacked by gunmen and an Iraqi soldier, patrolling with the Americans, abused the situation and killed the two soldiers.

He said the Iraqi serviceman had been "an insurgent infiltrator". He was arrested and is being questioned.

The Iraqi turncoat has been arrested: " Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator McCain, and Governor Huckabee, would you authorize the use of water-boarding to interrogate this soldier, with the hope of saving other US lives?"

___________________________

Iraqi soldier kills US soldiers BBC

An Iraqi soldier has opened fire on American troops, killing two and wounding three others, US and Iraqi officials have said.

The incident happened during a joint patrol in the north on 26 December, but fuller details have only now emerged.

An Iraqi general said the patrol had come under fire from gunmen in the city of Mosul, but his soldier had "abused" the situation and shot the Americans.

It is thought to be the first such case since the US-led invasion of 2003.

The US initially reported the deaths of Capt Rowdy Inman, 38, and Sgt Benjamin Portell, 27, as resulting from hostile small arms fire.

But Iraqi general Mutaa al-Khazraji said: "They (the joint patrol) were attacked by gunmen and the (Iraqi) soldier abused the situation and killed the two soldiers."

He said the Iraqi serviceman had been "an insurgent infiltrator". He was arrested and is being questioned.

An interpreter was also wounded alongside the three other soldiers.

Tensions remain high in Mosul - an ethically mixed area that is home to a variety of Muslim and Christian communities.

President Obama on Energy

"Our enemies are fully aware that they can use oil as a weapon against America. And if we don't take this threat as seriously as the bombs they build or the guns they buy, we will be fighting the War on Terror with one hand tied behind our back."

What is the Republican argument for asking the American people to vote for them based on their energy programs enacted when they had the power to do so?

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama
Governor's Ethanol Coalition
Washington, DC
Feb. 28, 2006

In this year's State of the Union address, President Bush told us that it was time to get serious about America's addiction to foreign oil. The next day, we found out that his idea didn't sit too well with the Saudi Royal Family. A few hours later, Energy Secretary Bodman backtracked and assured the world that even though the President said he planned to reduce the amount of oil we import from the Middle East, he actually didn't mean that literally.

If there's a single example out there that encapsulates the ability of unstable, undemocratic governments to wield undue influence over America's national security just because of our dependence on oil, this is it.

Now, I could stand up here and give you all plenty of reasons why it's a good idea for this country to move away from an oil-based economy. I could cite studies from scientists and experts and even our own State Department detailing the dangers of global warming - how it can destroy our coastal areas and generate more deadly storms. I could talk forever about the economic consequences of dependence - how it's decimating our auto industry and costing us jobs and emptying our wallets at the pump. And I could talk about the millions of new jobs and entire new industries we could create by transitioning to an alternative-fuel economy.

But all we really need to know about the danger of our oil addiction comes directly from the mouths of our enemies:

"[Oil] is the umbilical cord and lifeline of the crusader community." These are the words of Al Qaeda.

"Focus your operations on oil, especially in Iraq and the Gulf area, since this will cause them to die off [on their own]." These are the words Osama bin Laden.

More than anything else, these comments represent a realization of American weakness shared by the rest of the world. It's a realization that for all of our military might and economic dominance, the Achilles heel of the most powerful country on Earth is the oil we cannot live without.

Oil single-handedly fuels 96% of our transportation needs, and it's also critical to the manufacture of millions of goods and products in this country. As we saw during Hurricane Katrina, this kind of dependency means that the loss of even a small amount of oil and refining capacity for just a few days can cause economic panic and soaring prices. A serious embargo or permanent loss could cause untold disaster.

It would be nice if we could produce our way out of this problem, but it's just not possible. We only have 3% of the world's oil reserves. We could start drilling in ANWR today, and at its peak, which would be more than a decade from now, it would give us enough oil to take care of our transportation needs for about a month.

As a result, every single hour we spend $18 million on foreign oil. It doesn't matter if these countries are budding democracies, despotic regimes, or havens for the madrassas that plant the seeds of terror in young minds - they get our money because we need their oil.

One need only glance at headlines around the world to understand how dangerous this addictive arrangement truly is.

In Iran, Islamic fundamentalists are forging ahead with their nuclear program, knowing full well that the world's response to their actions will be influenced by our need for their oil. In fact, reports of a $100 billion oil deal between Iran and China were soon followed by China's refusal to press for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear intentions.

In Nigeria, militant rebels have been attacking the country's oil pipelines in recent weeks, sending prices soaring and calling into question the political stability of a country that represents America's fifth-largest source of oil imports.

In Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda has been attempting attacks on that country's poorly defended oil refineries for years. On Friday, they almost succeeded as a truck full of explosives was detonated by the shots of security guards just before it entered the refinery. Even this minor damage caused oil prices to jump $2 in a single day. But a former CIA agent tells us that if terrorists ever succeeded in destroying an entire oil complex, it could take enough oil off the market to cause economic catastrophe in the United States.

Our enemies are fully aware that they can use oil as a weapon against America. And if we don't take this threat as seriously as the bombs they build or the guns they buy, we will be fighting the War on Terror with one hand tied behind our back.

Now, the good news about the President's decision to finally focus on energy independence after five years is that it helps build bipartisan consensus that our reliance on foreign oil is a problem and shows that he understands the potential of renewable fuels to make a difference.

The bad news is that the President's energy policy treats our dependence on oil as more of a nuisance than a serious threat.

Just one day after he told us in the State of the Union that renewable fuels were the key to an energy independent future, we learned that the President's budget cuts would force layoffs at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Last week, this made for a rather awkward situation when the President wanted to use the lab for a photo-op - so awkward that the White House actually re-hired the laid-off researchers just to avoid the embarrassment.

This is only one example, but it tells the story of a larger weakness in the President's energy policy: it's simply not commensurate to the challenge.

There's a reason that some have compared the quest for energy independence to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo moon landing. Like those historic efforts, moving away from an oil economy is a major challenge that will require a sustained national commitment.

During World War II, we had an entire country working around the clock to produce enough planes and tanks to beat the Axis powers. In the middle of the Cold War, we built a national highway system so we had a quick way to transport military equipment across the country. When we wanted to beat the Russians into space, we poured millions into a national education initiative that graduated thousands of new scientists and engineers.

If we hope to strengthen our security and control our own foreign policy, we can offer no less of a commitment to energy independence.

But so far, President Bush seems like he is offering less - much less.

His funding for renewable fuels is at the same level it was the day he took office.

He refuses to call for even a modest increase in fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks.

His latest budget funds less then half of the energy bill he himself signed into law - leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in under-funded energy proposals.

And while he cannot seem to find the funding for any of these energy proposals, he has no problem allowing the oil companies to stiff taxpayers $7 billion in royalties that they owe us for drilling on public lands. These are the same oil companies that are currently enjoying the highest profits on record.

Again, this is just not a serious commitment to energy independence. The solutions are too timid - the reforms too small. America's dependence on oil is a major threat to our national security, and the American people deserve a bold commitment that has the full force of their government behind it.

This isn't to lay the blame for our energy problems entirely at the feet of our President. This is an issue that politicians from both parties clamor about when gas prices are the headline of the month, only to fall back into a trance of inaction once things calm down. And so we all need to get serious here. Automakers need to get serious about shifting their technology to greater fuel-efficiency, consumers need to get serious about buying hybrid cars, and Washington needs to get serious about working together to find a real solution to our energy crisis.

Such a solution is not only possible, it's already being implemented in other places around the world. Countries like Japan are creating jobs and slowing oil consumption by churning out and buying millions of fuel-efficient cars. Brazil, a nation that once relied on foreign countries to import 80% of its crude oil, will now be entirely self-sufficient in a few years thanks to its investment in biofuels.

So why can't we do this? Why can't we make energy security one of the great American projects of the 21st century?

The answer is, we can. The President's energy proposal would reduce our oil imports by 4.5 million barrels per day by 2025. Not only can we do better than that, we must do better than that if we hope to make a real dent in our oil dependency. With technology we have on the shelves right now and fuels we can grow right here in America, by 2025 we can reduce our oil imports by over 7.5. million barrels per day - an amount greater than all the oil we are expected to import from the entire Middle East.

We can do this by focusing on two things: the cars we drive and the fuels we use.

First, the cars. For years, we've hesitated to raise fuel economy standards as a nation in part because of a very legitimate concern - the impact it would have on Detroit. The auto industry is right when they argue that transitioning to more hybrid and fuel-efficient cars would require massive investment at a time when they're struggling under the weight of rising health care costs, sagging profits, and stiff competition.

But it's precisely because of that competition that they don't have a choice. China now has a higher fuel economy standard than we do, and Japan's Toyota is doubling production of the popular Prius to sell 100,000 in the U.S. this year.

There is now no doubt that fuel-efficient cars represent the future of the auto industry. If American car companies hope to be a part of that future - if they hope to survive - they must start building more of these cars.

But that's not to say we should leave the industry to face these costs on its own. Yes, we should raise fuel economy standards by 3% a year over the next fifteen years, starting in 2008. With the technology they already have, this should be an achievable goal for automakers. But we can help them get there.

Right now, one of the biggest costs facing auto manufacturers isn't the cars they make, it's the health care they provide. Health care costs make up $1,500 of the price of every GM car that's made - more than the cost of steel. Retiree health care alone cost the Big 3 automakers nearly $6.7 billion just last year.

So here's the deal we can make with the auto companies. It's a piece of legislation I introduced called "Health Care for Hybrids," and it would allow the federal government to pick up part of the tab for the auto companies' retiree health care costs. In exchange, the auto companies would then use some of that savings to build and invest in more fuel-efficient cars. It's a win-win proposal for the industry - their retirees will be taken care of, they'll save money on health care, and they'll be free to invest in the kind of fuel-efficient cars that are the key to their competitive future.

Now, building cars that use less oil is only one side of the equation. The other involves replacing the oil we use with home-grown biofuels. The Governors in this room have long known about this potential, and all of you have been leading the way on ethanol in your own states.

This coalition also knows that corn-based ethanol is only the beginning. If we truly want to harness the power of these fuels and the promise of this market, we can and must generate more cellulosic ethanol from agricultural products like corn stocks, switch grass and other crops our farmers grow.

Already, there are hundreds of fueling stations that use a blend of ethanol and gasoline known as E85, and there are millions of cars on the road with the flexible-fuel tanks necessary to use this fuel - including my own.

But the challenge we face with these biofuels is getting them out of the labs, out of the farms, and onto the wider commercial market. Every scientific study in the world could sing the praises of biofuels, but you might still be hard-pressed to find an investor willing to take the risk on a cellulosic ethanol plant or a brand-name petroleum company willing to build an E85 fueling station.

The federal government can help in two ways here. First, we can reduce the risk of investing. We already do this in a number of ways by funding projects critical to our national security. Energy independence should be no different. By developing an Energy Technology Program at the Defense Department, we can provide loan guarantees and venture capital to those with the best plans to develop and sell biofuels on a commercial market. The Defense Department will also hold a competition where private corporations get funding to see who can build the best new alternative-fuel plant. The Department can then use these new technologies to improve the energy security of our own military.

Once we take the risk out of investing, the second thing the government can do is to let the private sector know that there will always be a market for renewable fuels. We can do this in a few ways.

• First, we should ramp up the renewable fuel standard and create an alternative diesel standard in this country so that by 2025, 65 billion gallons of alternative fuels per year will be blended into the petroleum supply.

• Second, Washington should lead the way on energy independency by making sure that every single automobile the government purchases is a flexible-fuel vehicle - starting today. When it becomes possible in the coming years, we should make sure that every government car is a plug-in hybrid as well.

• Third, I'm supporting legislation that would make sure every single new car in America is a flexible-fuel vehicle within a decade. Currently it costs manufacturers just $100 to add these tanks to each car. But we can do them one better. If they install flexible-fuel tanks in their cars before the decade's up, the government should provide them a $100 tax credit to do it - so there's no excuse for delay.

• Fourth, there are already millions of people driving flexible-fuel vehicles who don't know it. The auto companies shouldn't get CAF'E credit for making these cars if they don't let buyers know about them, so I'd like to ask the industry to follow GM's lead and put a yellow gas cap on all flexible fuel vehicles starting today. Also, they should send a letter to those people who already have flexible-fuel vehicles so they can start filling up their tank at the closest E85 station.

• Finally, since there are only around 500 fueling stations that pump E85 in the country, we recently passed legislation that would provide tax credits of up to $30,000 for those who want to install E85 pumps at their station. But we should do even more - we should make sure that in the coming years, E85 stations are as easy to find as your gas station is now.

Make no mistake - none of these reforms will come easy, and they won't happen overnight. But we can't continue to settle for piecemeal, bite-sized solutions to our energy crisis. We need a national commitment to energy security, and to emphasize that commitment, we should install a Director of Energy Security to oversee all of our efforts. Like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the National Intelligence Director, this person would be an advisor to the National Security Council and have the full authority to coordinate America's energy policy across all levels of government. He or she would approve all major budget decisions and provide a full report to Congress and the country every year detailing the progress we're making toward our 2025 goal.

In the days and months after September 11th, Americans were waiting to be called to something bigger than themselves. Just like their parents and grandparents of the Greatest Generation, they were willing to serve and defend their country - not only on the fields of war, but on the homefront too.

This is our chance to step up and serve. The war against international terrorism has pitted us against a new kind of enemy that wages terror in new and unconventional ways. At home, fighting that enemy won't require us to build the massive war machine that Franklin Roosevelt called for so many years ago, but it will require us to harness our own renewable forms of energy so that oil can never be used as a weapon against America. From farmers and scientists to entrepreneurs and governors, everyone has a role to play in this effort. In fact, this afternoon I'm sitting down with business and military leaders to discuss this very topic.

Now is the time for serious leadership to get us started down the path of energy independence. Now is the time for this call to arms. I hope some of the ideas I've laid out today can serve as a basis for this call, but I also hope that members of both parties and all levels of government can come together in the near future to launch this serious quest for energy independence. Thank you.

No Such Thing as Free Monkey Sex

"Do you come here often?"

Monkey business: Male chimps 'pay for sex' by grooming their mates
Last updated at 11:07am on 3rd January 2008 Daily Mail

Male macaque monkeys "pay" for sex with females by grooming them, scientists believe.

In areas where there are fewer females, males are forced to groom their partners for up to twice as long before they are able to have sex, the research found.

Sexual activity among a 50-strong group of long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, increased after bouts of male-to-female grooming, according to findings published in Animal Behaviour journal and reported in New Scientist.

On average, females had sex 1.5 times an hour, but it jumped to 3.5 times an hour immediately after the female monkey was groomed by their male partner.

The females were also less likely to look elsewhere for sex after being groomed.

The monkey version of the "world's oldest profession" is also a rare example of market forces acting in nature, with the availability of females affecting the "price" of mating.

Michael Gumert of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said unlike examples of "reciprocal altruism" - in which one organism provides a service to another in return for getting something back at a later date - the value of sex fluctuated like any other economic commodity.

When there were several females in the area, the male monkeys would only have to do eight minutes of grooming before being able to mate.

But if there were fewer females than males around, a male would have to groom his partner for up to 16 minutes before sex, the research found.

Dr Gumert said: "When the opportunity arises, male macaque monkeys groom females to 'pay' for sex."

The macaques' behaviour is thought to be an example of a "biological market", a theory developed by Ronald Noe of the University of Strasbourg, France, and Peter Hammerstein of Humboldt University, Berlin.

Prof Noe said market forces had a strong influence on behaviour - in both animals and humans.

"There is a very well-known mix of economic and mating markets in the human species itself.

"There are many examples of rich old men getting young attractive ladies," he said.

Dutch Ban Iranian Nuclear Students

Background:

The Netherlands played a pivotal role in one of the 20th century’s biggest nuclear spying operations. Pakistani nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan obtained his doctors degree at the Delft technical university in 1967, and worked at the Physical Dynamic Research laboratory from 1972 until 1975. It was there that Mr Khan acquired knowledge of enriching uranium via the ultra centrifuge process, a method that is still in use today. He suddenly disappeared in 1975, only to reappear in 1976 as the leader of the Pakistani nuclear weapons research programme. In 2004, Pakistan announced that Mr Khan had sold nuclear information to Libya, Iran and North Korea. In doing so, Mr Khan was assisted by his Dutch business partner Henk Sleebos, who, years later, was handed a prison sentence for his illegal activities.

Former Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers says the then Dutch government was aware of Abdul Qadeer Khan's clandestine activities. Reportedly, he was not arrested at the request of the US intelligence service, the CIA, which wanted to gain insight in the network that the Pakistani scientist was a member of.

Dutch university bans Iranian students
BY RUBEN TEMMING* Radio Netherlands
03-01-2008

Iranian students are not welcome at the Technical University Twente in the town of Enschede. At the request of the Education Ministry and the Foreign Affairs Ministry, the university has agreed not to admit any Iranian students. The government fears that Iranian students and workers would steal sensitive nuclear information to help their government develop nuclear weapons. The university's decision is the direct result of a 2006 UN resolution calling on member states to prevent Iran from gaining access to nuclear knowledge.

The UN has been concerned about the Iranian nuclear research programme for some time. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, says there is no evidence that Iran is developing its own nuclear weapon. However, at the same time Iran is accused of not providing sufficient information on its uranium enrichment programme.

The most recent US intelligence report on Iran also concludes that there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear arms programme, but it does accuse Iran of withholding information. Tehran insists that its enrichment programme is intended exclusively for domestic production of the fuel rods needed for a nuclear power plant currently under construction.

Psychology

Twente University is allowed to admit Iranian students on condition it guarantees they will not have access to nuclear information, a guarantee the university says it is unable to give. So far, three Iranian students have been refused. Iranians who want to study psychology would also be rejected. A spokesperson says students are free to wander around the campus, and 24/7 surveillance would be impossible. Iranian students already studying at Twente will be allowed to complete their studies.

Twente is the first technical university in the Netherlands to introduce such strict measures. The Delft Technical University says it first considers the subject that the applicant wants to study. In other words, Delft does not reject Iranian students on principle. The Eindhoven Technical University refuses to comment and refers all inquiries to the foreign affairs ministry.

Iowans turn to Newcomers

I heard that something happened in Iowa last night. A relatively few people decided that they were tired of the same old same old politics as usual and from the corners of living rooms and gymnasiums sent the message that they are "Ready for a change." For Democrats, Barack Obama represents their split from the status quo, for Republicans it is Mike Huckabee. Why anyone should be surprised with these results is especially a mystery considering that lately the public has been wishing a pox on both parties.

For years (since losing to George Bush in 2000), Democrats (i.e. Reid, Pelosi, Michael Moore, Move-On, etc) and have been behaving very badly and very selfishly. The Republicans have come to be seen as sexually repressed perverts interesting only in war, earmarks and cheap Chicano labor.

So, Iowa represents a comeuppance to the parties. Hillary Rodham Clinton in her best day would never have won Miss Congeniality and yet there she is, the Democrat Establishment Standard Bearer. What is surprising is that since there are more Media watchers and political pundits than caucasites in Iowa and you would think more of them would have remembered Hillary's unfavorables. This is the woman who many said is "unelectable." Granted, in the run-up, some talking heads reminded us that people are uncomfortable with the Clinton and Bush dynasties. "No more right now, thank you."

This morning it certainly looks like Iowa at least is ready for some change. One striking Democrat factoid is that 57% of the under 30 caucasing crowd went for the fresh Prince with the hopeful but vague message. 57% is a landslide, at least in the one demographic and it translated to a narrow victory. It was also interesting that the older people went for Hillary. Once again, a generational divide shows us that human nature is unchanging. The young are idealistic; the old pragmatic. Of course, the conventional wisdom says that getting those young people to actually vote is easier said than done. It appears to have been done in Iowa and by a smooth-talking stranger, a man of mystery who came out of nowhere. This guy has gone from being an Illinois "state something-or-other" to US Senator and front runner for the Democratic nomination for POTUS. So far, Barack Hussein Obama has been able to get away with "glittering generalities" and hopeful platitudes. He's been a stealth candidate and we still don't know exactly what hit us.

Admittedly, this is Monday morning Quaterbacking but Republicans are disgusted with their own party and Huckabee is the only Republican in the race who could be considered an outsider. Why wouldn't he be the winner? There has been a harmonic convergence and the stars are in alignment. People are disgusted with the parties and the message was delivered in Iowa.

Real Life - When the Wheels Come Off

Life takes some strange twists and turns:

Former Arizona beauty queen accused of kidnapping, torturing ex-boyfriend in jewelry dispute

ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN
Associated Press Writer

TUCSON, Ariz. — A law school student and former beauty queen who has posed for a racy calendar while brandishing a weapon has been accused of kidnapping, biting and threatening a former boyfriend with a handgun.

Kumari Fulbright, 25, who is midway through her second year in law school, faces a long prison term if convicted of kidnapping, armed robbery, aggravated robbery and two counts of aggravated assault.

Fulbright, who competed for the Miss Arizona title in 2005 and 2006, recently completed a semester-long unpaid stint clerking for a federal judge, U.S. District Judge Raner Collins, his office said. She also poses wearing a shiny black bikini in a 2008 calendar that features women holding guns.

In the Dec. 18 indictment, Fulbright is accused of holding and torturing her 24-year-old ex-boyfriend in early December with the help of three other men, including another man she had previously dated.

Authorities think the dispute began because the ex-boyfriend was believed to have stolen jewlery given to Fulbright by the former beau suspected of helping in the attack.

Fulbright invited the man to her apartment, then excused herself to shower, said police spokesman Sgt. Fabian Pacheco. Then two men showed up and bound him with plastic ties and duct tape, accused him of taking the jewelry, and threatened to shoot him with pistols, Pacheco said.

When Fulbright finished her shower, she allegedly bit the man on his forearm, right hand and ear, held a butcher knife to his head, and told him she was going to kill him.

Authorities said the man was taken to another home, where the assault continued, then took him back to Fulbright's house, where she guarded him with a gun.

The man finally managed to free a hand and grabbed the gun, which discharged but hit no one, authorities said. As their struggle spilled outside, the man screamed for help, then ran to a home down the block, while Fulbright returned to her apartment, Pacheo said.

"He has some bite marks on him, evident and consistent with his account, and his hands were red and swollen, consistent with someone who had been tied up," Pacheco said.

A police complaint said the suspects stole the victim's wallet, money clip with $500 to $600, and his cell phone and briefcase.

Fulbright's phone is out of service and her apartment was unoccupied Wednesday, without any furniture. Efforts also were made to contact her through MySpace.com.

Tucson police also are seeking to serve her former boyfriend, Robert Ergonis, 44, and his brother, Michael Ergonis, 46, with arrest warrants charging them with kidnapping, armed robbery and aggravated assault, but believe they may have fled the country. Telephone numbers for the brothers were not listed.

Another man who was indicted with Fulbright remains jailed under $50,000 bond, but Fulbright was freed after arranging to have a similar bond posted.

Calls to Fulbright's attorney, Thomas Hartzell, and to the Miss Pima County pageant, which Fulbright won in 2005, were not returned. She also was selected Miss Desert Sun in 2006.

A spokeswoman for the University of Arizona, where Fulbright attends, said it was premature to talk about what could occur in terms of discipline. She and other faculty members declined further comment, citing student privacy.

Here's another strange story about man being his own worst enemy.

'Graphic fantasies' audiotape forces Tennessee judge to resign in embarrassment
BILL POOVEY
Associated Press Writer

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — A Tennessee judge resigned last month after making a recording of fantasies so lurid that when the tape fell into the hands of the police and FBI, they thought they were listening to a torture session and believed it might be linked to a murder case.

Ultimately, investigators brought no charges against Circuit Judge John B. Hagler, and police said Wednesday he is not a suspect in any investigation.

But the sensational case has led to allegations of professional retaliation, interdepartmental intrigue and strategic news leaks.

The recording was investigated by authorities more than two years ago, but its existence did not come to light publicly until just a few weeks ago, and details on the contents are only now coming out, at a hearing that began Wednesday on whether police must release the tape.

During those two years, the judge remained on the bench, hearing mostly family court cases like divorces and child custody.

Among the mysteries: Why did he make such a recording? Why is it coming to light just now? And what, exactly, is on the tape?

The tape was briefly examined by Chattanooga police and the FBI in late 2005 after a secretary who had just been fired by Hagler turned it over, authorities said. She told them she found the recording of the judge's voice on a tape that also contained legal dictation.

"It sounded like someone being tortured," Chattanooga police Sgt. Alan Franks testified Wednesday, offering the first details of what is on the tape.

Franks said the recording was investigated in relation to a still-unsolved 1997 murder. He gave no other details on the murder case.

"The content was so shocking. I have been a police officer for 24 years," Franks said before his testimony was cut off by an objection.

Investigators ultimately concluded the recording consisted only of fantasies.

Two years later, the tape made its way to the prosecutor in Hagler's Tennessee district, District Attorney Steve Bebb. Then, last month, the Chattanooga Times Free Press learned about the recording from an unidentified source, and Hagler confirmed it and resigned.

Hagler said that he had done nothing wrong but that the recording had caused great embarrassment to friends, family and the courts. Hagler, who is 65 and married, has been a circuit judge in Cleveland, Tenn., since 1990 and served three terms as president of the Tennessee Trial Judges Association.

"The description of it as containing 'graphic fantasies' ... is an accurate and sufficient description and all any decent person would want to hear of it," the judge said in a statement.

Bebb, the district attorney, said he, too, concluded the recording was not connected to any crime, but what he heard led him to persuade Hagler, whom he describes as a longtime friend, to resign.

"This would disturb any human being who heard it," Bebb said.

The judge strongly suggested the leak was committed by someone with a grudge against him, perhaps someone he ruled against.

"In my opinion, the real story here, so strongly expressed by an alert and outraged public, is not about me or my sins, but about whether one of our essential public institutions, the judiciary, has been the victim of a retaliatory attack," Hagler said in his statement. He did not elaborate but alluded to a dispute within the local bar association.

The district attorney has disputed speculation the leak was related to the judge's recent ruling against a local sheriff's department's request for more funding.

Bebb said in December that he sent a copy of the tape to the state Court of the Judiciary, which handles complaints against judges. A court spokeswman said the panel would not act because the judge has resigned and it no longer has jurisdiction.

Members of the local bar have asked federal prosecutors to investigate how the existence of the tape became public. Police said FBI agents are asking them questions about the leak.

The judge is fighting a request by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Associated Press and other news organizations that the tape be released. The hearing resumes on Thursday.

Hagler was relaxed and smiling at times during Wednesday's hearing. He said during a break that he had not heard the tape in the hands of police and could not be sure it was the one he recorded. "I hope it's my voice," he said.

Hillary Dancing Towards Defeat

It may be too close to call, but not too close to feel. It feels like Obama to me. Hillary stripped of a few of her seven veils of inevitability will not be pretty. It does not look good for her.

_____________________

Is this the end of the Clintons?
Posted by Toby Harnden on 02 Jan 2008 at 07:04
Telegraph

Was I witnessing the last throes of the 15-year-long Clinton political psychodrama in Ames, Iowa yesterday? Here’s my newspaper piece on Hillary’s final plea for support in tomorrow’s caucuses. The case she made was far from compelling – that she’s human (honest) and that she has unrivalled experience. Both propositions are debatable and she was much less compelling than Barack Obama and John Edwards have been in recent days. She seems to have had some kind of speech therapy to create a softy-soft voice that made me long for the grating shrillness of yore.

The Obama campaign is supremely confident that victory is within its grasp. “So what?” I hear you ask. Iowa is a sparsely populated, unrepresentative state in which on the Democratic side only 124,000 people caucused in 2004. Surely it can’t matter that much? Don’t bet on it. If Hillary loses tomorrow, her presidential bid is likely to collapse like a house of cards.

For all the arguments against Iowa having such disproportionate influence – and Christopher Hitchens airs some good ones with characteristic aplomb here – it does mean that pre-packaged, calculating politicians like Hillary are scutinised and exposed (we’ll see if Mitt Romney is too).

All the money and establishment backing she had behind her couldn’t prevent her getting caught out by voters asking her about Iran and Iran, discovered planting softball questions and rumbled for having advisers forwarding smear emails about Obama. She tried to remain aloof and away from the voters but it didn’t work – if anything, the seeds of her demise (if that’s what it turns out to be) lay in that strategy.

When an incumbent-style campaign is built on a sense of inevitability, it comes under huge strain when hit by an early defeat. The bubble is burst – which is what will happen if Hillary loses Iowa to Obama in Iowa (if she loses to Edwards, the picture will be less clear).

Of course, if Hillary pulls through then it’s difficult to see how Obama and Edwards can beat her – this is absolutely their best shot. Adam Nagourney of the “New York Times” argues here that Iowa might mean nothing. That’s possible. But my hunch is that it will end up meaning everything.

Who's the Goat?

Criminal Probe Opened Over CIA Tapes

By MATT APUZZO, AP
Wed Jan 2, 4:32 PM EST

Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed an outside prosecutor Wednesday to lead a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes.

The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.

"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

Mukasey named John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, to oversee the case. Durham has a reputation as one of the nation's most relentless prosecutors. He served as an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI's use of mob informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to prison.

"The CIA will of course cooperate fully with this investigation as it has with the others into this matter," agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said.

CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson, who worked with the Justice Department on the preliminary inquiry, has recused himself from the investigation. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va., are also recused.

Mukasey named Durham the acting U.S. attorney on the case, a designation the Justice Department frequently makes when top prosecutors are recused. He will not serve as a special prosecutor such as Patrick Fitzgerald, who operated autonomously while investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA operative's identity.

The CIA has already agreed to open its files to congressional investigators, who have begun reviewing documents at the agency's Virginia headquarters. The House Intelligence Committee has ordered Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official who directed the tapes be destroyed, to appear at a hearing Jan. 16.

Rodriguez's attorney, Robert S. Bennett, had no comment.

-----------------------------

Is the administration looking for a fall guy. Someone who can take the wrap and the heat. A sacrificial lamb or a scapegoat to be turned out into the wilderness?

2008, I Wonder What Was Happening in 1008?

A new year. This is a day to start fresh, a new dawn, a new day, a time to refresh. Shall we empty the cache and let the party for 2008 begin?

After all, one of the criticisms thrown at the chair of this august establishment is that old Whit and Deuce may be a tad pessimistic, perhaps a little over-salted with cynicism, and not ebullient, especially Whit. We do not walk on the bright side enough as DR may be wont to point out. All worthy and constructive and well received criticisms for sure. For sure. 

I got thinking, 2008, how will things change and how will they be different? 2007 was what, Muslims, Sunnis, Pakis, Shiites, Iraq, Iran, Darfur, mosques, terror, destruction....you get it.

Maybe 2008 will be the year where we can help make things better in the Muslim world?

Let us take a look and see how things were one thousand years ago. What was going on  in 1008? Who was born and what happened?

Back to the future, meet Al-Muizz ibn Badis, born in 1008. 

Al-Muizz ibn Badis

Wikipedia
Al-Muizz ibn Badis (Arabic: المعز بن باديس)‎ (1008 - 1062) was the fourth ruler of the Zirids in Ifriqiya and reigned from 1016 to 1062.

Al-Muizz ascended the throne as a minor following the death of his father Badis ibn Mansur (995-1016), with his aunt acting as regent. In 1016 there was a bloody revolt in Ifriqiya in which the Fatimid residence Al-Mansuriya was completely destroyed and 20,000 Shiites were massacred. The unrest forced a ceasefire in the conflict with the Hammadids of Algeria, and their independence was finally recognised in 1018.

Al-Muizz took over the government in 1022 following the overthrow of his aunt. The relationship with the Fatimids was strained, when in 1027 they supported a revolt of the Zanatas in Tripolitania which resulted in permanent loss of control of the region. His son Abdallah shortly ruled Sicily in 1038-1040, after intervening with a Zirid army in the civil war that broke out in the island.

The political turmoil notwithstanding, the general economic wellbeing initially made possible an extensive building programme. However, the kingdom found itself in economic crisis in the 1040s, reflected in currency devaluation, epidemic and famine. This may have been related to the high level of tribute which the Zirids were compelled to pay annually to the Fatimids (one million gold dinars a year).

When al-Muizz, under the influence of Sunni jurists in Kairouan, recognised the Abbasids in Baghdad as rightful Caliphs in 1045, the break with the Fatimids was complete.

The Fatimids then deported the Bedouin tribes of the Banu Hilal and the Banu Sulaym from Egypt to Ifriqiya. The invasion of the Bedouin (1051-1052) led to great hardship after the defeat at Jabal Haydaran, severely impacting agriculture in Ifriqiya. The conques